Eye of the Whale (27 page)

SIXTY

4:05
P.M.
Davis

T
EO THREW A SHIRT
into his old duffel bag. He did not have much, and he did not need much. For so many years, he had thought he needed Elizabeth, but now he knew she was not for the having. He would go back to his whales and his people, and he would be content. Maybe he’d even settle down with one of the island women who would take him.

He wrote out a note telling Elizabeth that he had left a “present” for her in the freezer of the community room. He was no longer worried about reminding her of Sliver and her calf, but he knew the package—and Elizabeth—would be safer if it was not in her house.

He pulled the duffel over his shoulder and headed for the door.

N
ILSEN WATCHED
as an endless parade of schoolchildren marched in front of his car. An orange-vested crossing guard held up a big red stop sign. Nilsen could feel the weight of his gun where it hung in the shoulder holster. This time he would have the upper hand with that island whaler. He’d wanted to act sooner, but Kazumi had been strangely unwilling, wanting to take steps first himself. He didn’t know what they were, but they had failed, and now he had permission to take care of the whaler and his girlfriend.

Children looked through the windshield at him. Once they were out of the crosswalk, he stepped on the gas and drove quickly. He’d get the package and settle the score. He rubbed his neck where the islander had pressed it with a knife.

T
EO CLOSED THE DOOR
behind him and headed down the path. He needed to get to the bus terminal, where he’d buy a ticket to Miami. From there he’d catch one of the cargo boats that went to the islands.

“Teo!”

Elizabeth was walking up the path from the parking lot.

“I was afraid you had already left.”

“Leaving now.”

“Teo, what’s the package?”

Teo led Elizabeth past the mailboxes and the green lawn where the children were playing, past the pool, and finally to the community room. He was about to open the lock with his knife when Elizabeth pulled out her key. She dangled it in front of him.

After opening the freezer, Teo moved a box that contained the leftovers of someone’s wedding cake.

“Is back here.” He pulled out the package, carefully wrapped in white butcher paper. It was still frozen. “They offer me twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars, but I keep it for you. I wait for the right time. Then I see it put you in danger and I hide it.”

Elizabeth tore open the paper, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. It was a black tube.

“Is the calf privates.”

“You brought me a whale
penis?”

“I doubt the postman take it,” Teo said defensively.

“You brought this all the way from Bequia and across the country on a Greyhound bus?”

“I keep it on ice so it don’t spoil.”

“But why?”

“Is something wrong with this whale, real wrong. Look at this.”

SIXTY-ONE

National Institute of Ecotoxicology
Montreal, Canada

M
ADDINGS’S NOSE AND CHEEKS
were still red and stung from the wind that had greeted him at the airport on landing in Montreal. Although now indoors, he was shivering in the cold dissection lab. He pulled his white cardigan more tightly around his neck and wondered if the shocking sight in front of him was partly to blame for his trembling.

It had been only that morning at his office in Cambridge that he’d received the call from Michel Roland at the Faculté de Médecine Vétérinaire of the University of Montreal. As soon as he had heard the request, he canceled all of his appointments and took the next plane from Logan.

Roland had asked him to come up to investigate a carcass. Maddings knew that Roland, the head of the National Institute of Ecotoxicology, had seen just about everything since dissecting his first beluga in 1982. Yet his voice sounded extremely agitated on the phone, which was why Maddings had flown up immediately. As one of the world’s leading experts on whale anatomy, Maddings thought he had seen everything, too.

“I don’t believe it. I need confirmation,” Roland had said in his succinct Québécois French accent. The mystery hidden in the corpse of this whale would make it famous in the scientific world, and
Roland no doubt wanted an expert like Maddings to witness—and validate—his findings.

Maddings looked down at DL-406. DL was for
Delphinapterus leucas
, the beluga’s Latin name. The beluga lay on the table, its pursed lips much flatter and more humanlike than a dolphin’s. The skin of the corpse was gray. It would not have changed to the characteristic white for several more years—that is, if the whale had lived. Maddings marveled at how much the face of the beluga looked like a human embryo, with its large, bulbous head. A smile haunted its face even after death.

They could tell by the enamel rings of this whale’s teeth—just as botanists can read the age of a tree by the rings of its trunk—that it was not even two years old and was still no doubt nursing. That was the problem.

Maddings had read about highly contaminated stillborn beluga whales found washed up on the shore. It was yet more evidence that the mother’s toxins were passed through the placenta. After birth, this baby would have nursed on a diet of rich milk that came as it did in all mammals, from the mother’s fat stores. But this whale had been receiving a steady diet of contaminants along with its mother’s milk.

Pulling on his surgical gloves, Maddings realized this must be the reason that the beluga whale population had not recovered. Four decades ago, when the public had discovered the extent of the contamination, the government had cleaned up the waters of the estuary near Montreal, but these immortal contaminants were still living in the bodies of the whales and being passed on from generation to generation.
Would this not also be true for humans?

Roland walked into the room, looking like he had aged quite a bit since Maddings had seen him last. Behind his large horn-rimmed glasses, there were purple bags under his eyes. Maddings also recog
nized the thick nose and strong chin of the French trappers who had settled this area two hundred years ago. Roland’s hair, parted in the center, now had wisps of gray.

“So sorry. I was on the phone with the health minister. Thank you for coming.”

“I’m just glad I was able to get here.”

“This is my Book of the Dead,” Roland said as he closed up his log and handed it to one of his assistants, a red-haired woman with a thin, birdlike face. During the earlier dissection, Roland had found and recorded an astonishing litany of diseases that he now began to identify, touching the flat side of the scalpel to each area.

“Here you can see lesions in the adrenal and thyroid glands; malignant tumors in the breasts and uterus; gum disease and missing teeth; ulcers in the mouth, throat, and stomach. And over here, you can see pneumonia and emphysema, as black and extensive as in a lifelong smoker. And down here, bladder cancer, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is quite similar to what many workers at a nearby aluminum factory suffer from. Throughout, there is also widespread bacterial infection, suggesting a highly compromised immune system.”

Maddings shook his head at this litany of misery that would have rivaled Job’s.

“All of these we have seen before, but this is why I asked you to fly up. This we have never seen in a female.” Roland pointed down to the base of the abdominal cavity.

“My Lord,”
Maddings said as he saw what Roland was pointing his scalpel at: two grape-sized testicles that were connected to the rest of a male reproductive tract, including the epididymis, the hothouse where sperm were grown, and the tubular vas deferens, through which they were discharged from the body.

Roland had found in this whale the extremely rare biological phenomenon of hermaphroditism. An animal having both male and
female reproductive tracts was almost never seen in wildlife and had never been discovered in whales. Maddings knew that the sex of a baby, whether human or any other mammal, was set during the first few months of life. Exquisitely sensitive chemical signals determined whether a creature became male or female. Was this a true hermaphrodite—with both male and female parts? Or was this female really a male whose normal development had been arrested?

Maddings was wondering what could have caused this. As if Roland’s research assistant had read his mind, he came running into the operating room breathlessly. He spoke in English when he recognized the famed Professor Maddings standing in their lab.

“Dr. Roland, the report on the tissue sample has just arrived from the Fisheries and Oceans lab. They found mercury, DDT, and PCBs.” The assistant paused, knowing that what he was about to say next would be controversial. “The PCBs in the whale’s body were over five hundred parts per million.”

Maddings couldn’t believe his ears, but it was Roland who answered, “That’s impossible. That’s ten times higher than the contamination level for hazardous waste.” Roland looked at the report and shook his head. “By law, this whale would need a special permit to swim through Canadian waters.”

Maddings was thinking about the data from the
Odyssey,
a five-year voyage that several of his colleagues had just completed, trying to establish baseline levels of contamination in the world’s oceans. The level of toxic pollution in even the most remote locations and in sea life everywhere was staggering. Perhaps this whale was demonstrating the aberrant development and disease such contaminants were causing. Pollution was replacing the harpoon as the greatest threat to whales, but pollution, unlike the harpoon, was a danger not only to whales.

As he looked down at the silent whale, he thought of the high-pitched squeaks, squeals, and whistles that had earned the beluga its
nickname, the “sea canary.” Perhaps the corpse in front of him really was the canary in the coal mine.

Maddings went outside to escape the smell in the operating room. It was as if the whale had begun decaying even before its death. He breathed the cold air, which seemed so fresh and filled with life. Was this deformity of the genitals a unique case, or was it a growing phenomenon? Maddings feared he knew the answer.

SIXTY-TWO

Davis

E
LIZABETH STARED
into the open package at the nipple slits on either side of the black and shriveled skin of the penis.

“His boy thing got girl things,” Teo said with all the scientific precision of a five-year-old. But Teo knew whales, and he knew what was wrong with this one.

“I can see that,” Elizabeth said, unable to tear her eyes away.

“The whalers aint want anyone to know,” Teo said.

Elizabeth thought of Pete Sanchez, the toxicologist Professor Ginsburg had told her about. “We’ve got to take a sample to get tested,” she said to Teo. “And find out what caused this.”

Elizabeth and Teo took the package back to the town house, away from the curious eyes of four older women who had come to play bridge. With the digital camera, Elizabeth took some photos of the whale penis and its unusual nipple slits.

“The whalers be back for it. They aint give up until they get it,” Teo warned.

Elizabeth used Teo’s sharp knife to cut off a sample of the defrosting whale skin, taking it from the already cut edge and careful to make sure she did not change its appearance. She did not know what the whalers had seen, but she wanted them to think that it was untouched. She wrapped the small piece of black skin in a paper napkin and then put it in the empty box of fish sticks that Teo handed her. She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.

“Elizabeth,” Teo said.

She looked back at Teo in surprise. He’d never called her Elizabeth before, always Liza. He said, “I hear what you say. That you want your man back. I hear you real good.”

“Thank you, Teo.”

“Maybe I see you next year.”

“We’ll see, Teo. But tell Milton I’ll get him his boat one way or another.”

“I know you will.”

At the door, Elizabeth stopped. “Thank you, Teo…thank you for caring about the whales.”

T
EO WRAPPED
the butcher paper back around the whale part and headed out the door to leave it in the community room. He would call the whalers and tell them where it was. It was the only way to ensure that they would leave Elizabeth alone.

Over the tall fence that surrounded the small courtyard, Teo could see Nilsen walking up the path, his right hand in the pocket of his black leather jacket.

Teo hurried back into the house. He threw his duffel in the back room and quickly placed the whale part in the freezer. He’d left the front door slightly open. When Nilsen opened it, Teo jumped off the couch in feigned surprise.

Nilsen pulled out a gun from his pocket and pointed it at Teo’s chest. “Are you going to give me the package, or am I going to have to get it from your girlfriend?”

Teo couldn’t help himself. “She aint me girlfriend no more.”

“Where is it?” Nilsen spat out.

“Is in the freezer.”

Nilsen urged Teo toward the kitchen with the gun.

Teo had no choice but to turn his back on Nilsen as he opened the freezer. He was about to reach for the package when he felt the nose of the gun against his back.

“You never should have put a knife to my throat.”

“I aint mean anything by it.”

“Well, I don’t mean anything by this.”

SIXTY-THREE

4:30
P.M.
Sacramento

F
RANK WALKED INTO
the doctors’ lounge. Tom was watching a clinical video on the television, shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

“What’s wrong?” Frank asked.

“Look at this,” Tom said without taking his eyes off the screen. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Frank saw the sperm magnified over a thousand times. They looked like liquid pins, their tails lashing. But many were not moving at all. Then Frank saw what Tom was pointing at.