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 heard 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.