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  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.

  A famous actress came to Bar Harbor to personally plead for the life of the blue lobster. Tomasso offered to spare if it the actress slept with him. She slapped him. Tomasso, cheek as red as a common lobster's, dropped the blue lobster into a boiling pot of water and ate it himself out of spite, dropping off the angry red discarded shell at the hotel where the actress slept in selfish isolation.

  After that, people shunned Tomasso Testaverde. Other lobstermen especially. It did not matter to him, though. Tomasso cared only about taking lobsters from the Gulf of Maine. And the lobsters were there for the taking, to be sure.

  He used all the tricks, such as soaking cloth in kerosene and baiting his lobster traps with the malodorous stuff although this was frowned upon for environmental reasons. For some reason no one knew, lobsters were attracted to the scent of kerosene in the water.

  But it was the rules and regulations that bothered Tomasso Testaverde the most. They were many and inconvenient.

  Lobsters under a certain length could not be taken legally. These Tomasso dropped into a secret icefilled chest in his boat. These he ate himself. Working with lobsters had not dulled his taste for the crustacean's sweet, firm meat. It pleased him to think he ate for free what rich men better than he paid good money to enjoy on special occasions.

  Another rule said the egg-bearing female of any size must be returned to the sea to protect future generations of lobstermen by ensuring future generations of lobsters. Tomasso, who had no sons, thought the law should not apply to him. Only to men with futures. Tomasso cared only about today. Only about survival. Tomorrow would take care of itself.

  "The law applies to everyone," a man in a bar once said to him over beer, Buffalo wings and complaints.

  "Different rules for different men. That is my law," Tomasso boasted.

  An unfortunate admission, because the man was from the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in Portland and he followed Tomasso down to the docks and took down the name of his scunga-bunga jonesporter boat, the Jeannie 1, named after a cousin Tomasso deflowered at a tender age.

  The next time he went out, Tomasso was casually hosing off the jellylike black eggs from under the curled tail where female lobsters carry their tiny eggs. That made them legal. Technically.

  A Coast Guard lifeboat came upon Tomasso as he was about this activity, and he hastily finished what he was doing and tried to look innocent as he was hailed and boarded.

  "What can I do for you fellows?" he asked.

  A Coast Guard inspector stepped onto the Jeannie I and said in a very serious voice, "Inspection. Suspicion of scrubbing."

  "I keep a clean boat," Tomasso said, trying to keep a straight face, too.

  They took up the lobster he had just deposited into the holding bin. The hold was abrim with crawling red-brown crustaceans. There were a few pistols, too, as the one-claw culls were called.

  "All my lobster are over the legal limit," Tomasso protested. "You may inspect them if you wish. I have nothing to hide."

  Two inspectors dropped into the hold and did that, using caliperlike measuring tools designed for that purpose. They were very professional as they measured the carapace.

  Tomasso watched unconcerned. He knew as long as they didn't find the secret hatch, he was all right.

  But when they came up with one particular lobster and an inspector dabbed some indigo solution from an eyedropper onto the swimmerets under the tail, which the other held straight, Tomasso grew worried.

  "This lobster has recently had eggs," he was told.

  "I see no eggs," Tomasso said quickly.

  "The eggs are gone. According to our tests, the cement that holds them on is recent."

  "Cement? What would a lobster know of cement?" And throwing his head back, Tomasso laughed uproariously.

  The inspectors didn't laugh with him. They handcuffed him and towed his boat back to Bar Harbor, where he was warned and fined.

  It was a bitter experience. Not only was it becoming impossible for a lobsterman to earn a good living in Maine, but it was no longer safe to have a convivial beer with a stranger. The bars were filled with spies.

  For a while Tomasso avoided taking the eggbearers, but they were too great a temptation. He hear
d that chlorine bleach could erase all trace of the natural cement that lobsters secreted to hold their eggs in place. Tomasso found it worked. The next time he was caught, they had to let him go, though they weren't happy about it. The jugs of chlorine bleach lay in plain sight.

  On the day Tomasso ran out of days, the Jeannie I puttered out of the harbor into the gulf with open cargo holds and many jugs of chlorine bleach.

  In a zone where the Coast Guard seldom ventured, where the lobsters were not as plentiful and therefore it was possible to work without competition or interference, Tomasso set down his traps.

  It was a cold, bitter, blustery day, and only because he drank his profits did Tomasso venture out. He often dreamed of wintering in Florida, where fishermen caught real fish like tarpon and swordfish. But he didn't have the savings to achieve this dream. Not yet.

  Tomasso was lowering traps and pots and hauling them up again by stern-mounted block and tackle when a great gray ship came out of the low-lying fog. He took instant notice of it. One moment it was not there, and the next it was bearing down on him as big as a house, streamers of fog curling out of its way.

  Tomasso had a dozen claw-pegged egg-bearers on the deck in wooden trays and was dousing them with bleach when the great gray ship showed itself like a silent apparition.

  He had never seen one like it. Lobstermen didn't go out as far as deep-sea fishermen, so the sight of a behemoth factory ship was an unfamiliar one to Tomasso Testaverde.

  The ship hadn't veered off course, and Tomasso gave his air horn a tap. It blared, echoing off the oncoming bow.

  A foghorn blared back.

  Tomasso nodded. "They see me. Good. Then let them go around me. I am a working man."

  But the ship didn't change course. It came steaming directly at the Jeannie I. Its foghorn continued to blare.

  Dropping his jug, Tomasso dived for the wheelhouse and got the engine muttering. He threw it into reverse because that seemed to be the quickest route out of harm's way.

  Still the great gray ship plowed on.

  Cursing, Tomasso shook a weatherbeaten fist as red as a lobster at them. "Fungula!" he swore.

  Men lined the forward rails, men in blues and whites. Their faces looked strange from a distance.

  Tomasso looked hard at these faces. They looked all alike. They weren't the faces of fishermen, which are raw and red. These were a stark white, and in the center of those faces splayed some blue blotch tattoo.

  For a strange moment Tomasso's limited imagination made those blue blotches into rows of identical lobsters. And he thought of the blue lobster he had eaten, for which he was still reviled.

  For a queasy moment he saw the identical impassive faces staring at him as men out to avenge the blue lobster that had been Tomasso's most famous meal.

  But that couldn't be. The blue blotch must represent something else.

  The great gray ship made a long turn, and its bow was soon lining up with the Jeannie I.

  "Are these men mad?" Tomasso muttered, this time throwing his boat forward.

  The Jeannie I avoided being struck by a good margin, but the other ship seemed determined to catch him.

  There was no radio on the Jeannie I. A lobsterman didn't need one, believed Tomasso Testaverde. But now he wished he had a radio to call the Coast Guard. This mystery ship was playing with him the way a big fish plays with a little one.

  It was possible to avoid the big ship whose name was some unpronounceable thing Tomasso didn't know.

  But try as Tomasso might, it wasn't possible to outrun it.

  Setting a heading for land, he ran the Jeannie I flat out. She dug in her stern, and the bow lifted as high as it could. But hard on her cold, foaming wake came the sinister gray ship with its ghost-faced crew.

  It wasn't a long chase. Not even three nautical miles. The huge gray knife of a prow loomed closer and closer, and its shadow fell on the Jeannie I, drowning it like the Shadow of Death.

  In his slicker, Tomasso Testaverde swore and cursed and sweated, hot and cold alternately. "What do you want? What do you bastards want?" he screamed over his shoulder.

  The remorseless gray ship nudged the Jeannie I once. She spurted ahead, her fat stern fractured.

  Tomasso let out a pungent wail. "Mangia la cornata!"

  For the cold ocean was pouring into the Jeannie I, washing her decks. It happened very fast. Taking on water, the lobster boat slowed. The gray prow lunged anew, splintering the wounded boat.

  Tomasso jumped clear. There was nothing else for him to do.

  By some miracle he swam clear of the foamy upheaval that was the Jeannie I going down.

  The cold made his muscles shrink and his bones turn to ice, it came upon him so swiftly. He was intensely cold. With sick eyes he watched the big ship glide on past, its sides bumping aside the fresh driftwood and kindling that used to be the Jeannie I.

  The warmth of death came over Tomasso quickly. He knew how one would grow warm just before succumbing to the cold of exposure and hypothermia. It was as true for a child who falls asleep in the snowy woods as for a man adrift in the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine.

  Tomasso was a survivor. But he knew he would not survive this.

  His body like lead, he began to sink. He didn't feel the hands clutching his ice-rimed hair and flailing arms, nor did he know he was being hauled into a dory.

  He only knew that some time later he lay in the fish hold of a ship. It was cold. He tried to move but couldn't. Lifting his head, he looked down and saw that his body was blue and naked. It trembled and shivered involuntarily. It was his body. Tomasso recognized it, but he couldn't really feel it.

  I am shivering and I don't feel it, he thought in a vague, wondering frame of mind.

  Men were hovering around him. He could see their faces. White. Gleaming white. The blue tattoo that went from forehead to chin and spread out over nose and mouth and cheeks wasn't shaped like a lobster. It was something else.

  Tomasso did not know what the design was, only that it was familiar.

  A man stepped up and began to apply something white and gleaming to Tomasso's unfeeling face.

  They are trying to save me. They are applying some warming salve to my face. I have been saved. I will survive.

  Then one of them stepped up with a living fish in one hand, a fish knife in the other. With a quick slash, he decapitated the fish and, without ceremony, while the other man was calmly applying creamy white unguent to Tomasso's features, he inserted the bleeding stump of the fish into Tomasso's open mouth.

  Tomasso tasted blood and fish guts.

  And he knew he was tasting death.

  He did not feel them turn his inert body over and perform an obscene act upon his dying dignity with another fish.

  He never dreamed, not even in death, that he was destined to be the spark in a confrontation that would shake the world from which he took much but gave back so very little.

  Chapter 12

  Boston traffic was, for Boston traffic, almost normal. There were only two accidents, neither serious, although one looked as if someone decided to pull a U-turn onto the UMass off-ramp. The pickup truck in question had ended up on its back like an upset turtle, and the tires were nowhere to be seen.

  When the cab he was riding swerved suddenly, Remo saw them rolling in different directions like big black doughnuts out for a stroll.

  "Just another day on the Southeast Distressway," the cabbie muttered to himself.

  Remo Williams never got used to turning the corner and seeing his house. It wasn't actually a house really. It was a condominium now, but the units were never marketed for several very good reasons, not the least of which was that before it had been converted, the building had been a stone church.

  It wasn't a typical church. A typical church is typically topped by a witch's-hat steeple with a cross on top. Its lines were medieval, although it looked very modern with its fieldstone walls and double row of roof dormers.

  Still, it had b
een built as a house of worship, not a dwelling. The Master of Sinanju had wrested it from Harold Smith during a contract negotiation several years earlier. Remo, of course, had had no say in the matter. Not that he really cared. After years of living out of suitcases, it was nice to have a permanent address. And he had one wing of the place all to himself.

  What Remo hated most were the idle comments of the cabdrivers.

  "You live here?" this one blurted when Remo told him to pull over. "In this rock pile?"

  "It's been in my family for centuries," Remo assured him.

  "A church?"

  "It's actually a castle transported brick by brick from the ancestral estate in Upper Sinanju."

  "Where's that?"

  "New Jersey."

  "They have castles in Jersey?"

  "Not anymore. This was the last one to be carried off before state castle taxes went through the roof."

  "Must be pre-Revolutionary."

  "Pre-pre-Revolutionary," said Remo, slipping a twenty through the pay slot. He had replenished his cash supply at an airport ATM with a card he carried in his back pocket.

  At the door Remo rang the bell. And rang it again.

  To his surprise a plump dumpling of an Asian woman with iron gray hair padded up to the two glass ovals of the double doors. She wore a nondescript quilted costume that wasn't exactly purple and not precisely gray, but might have been lilac.

  She looked at Remo, winking owlishly and opened the door.

  "Who are you?" Remo demanded.

  The old woman bowed. When her face came up, Remo studied it and decided she was South Korean, not North Korean. That was a relief. For a moment there, he was afraid she was some cousin of Chiun's come to visit for the next decade.

  "Master awaits," she said in broken English.

  "He in the bell tower?"

  "No, the fish cellar."

  "What fish cellar?" asked Remo.

  "The one in basement," said the old woman.