The Pirate's Daughter (2 page)

“Because, you know, they make pills for anxiety. I read that anxiety comes from a buildup of the wrong kind of chemicals in the brain. You swallow one pill, and it lifts like a cloud.”

“That's just not true,” Wilson said.

“I'm really worried about you,” Andrea said, softening a little. “You should go back to that therapist.”

“Don't start,” Wilson said.

Andrea believed Wilson's sense of dread was a sickness, like the flu, that could be cured through subtle alterations of brain chemistry with mood-altering drugs. He saw it as something far more spectacular, an epic curse borne through the generations: When Wilson
was nine, his father perished in the famous wreck of the four forty-five, an overcrowded express train that derailed and plunged off the Trohog Bridge into the Potswahnamee River; less than a year later his mother was crushed to death in a bizarre accident. And there had been a great-uncle—the details were sketchy—who had gone to seek his fortune in the diamond mines of Peru a half century before and disappeared without a trace.

“Just give me a day,” Wilson said. “I'll be fine tomorrow.”

A tense silence followed in which Wilson heard the faint computerized rattle of Andrea's office and the traffic coming along Commerce Avenue and her even breath. At last she gave a sigh and a hard “Fine—see you first thing in the morning,” and hung up the phone.

Andrea was Wilson's employer as well as his lover. A junior vice-president at the Tea Exchange, a small but respected brokerage firm in the Financial Mile, she dealt in commodities futures on minerals at the bottom of the sea, on herds of cattle in Bolivia, on boatloads full of big blue tiger shrimp from the Marianas Trench, on silos of barley in the Ukraine—everything except tea. She had hired Wilson as her executive assistant the year before when he couldn't find a job, but as everyone knows, professionalism and passion don't mix. Things had been a little cool between them of late. The job was an act of kindness they both had come to regret.

Wilson ate a sober bowl of bran cereal for breakfast, dressed in unobtrusive gray clothes, and took the eleven o'clock bus over the bridge into the city.

From Metropolitan Terminal, he walked up twenty blocks to an odd little store tucked away between a new French restaurant and a warehouse full of rubber bands in a dark canyon of a street, in a part
of the city that was just becoming trendy. The store was marked only by an orange banner of a silhouetted witch on a broom. Its small display window contained a few ancient tomes with faded gilt bindings, ceramic canisters full of unspecified herbs, and, most remarkably, a dusty stuffed monkey wearing a fez and dressed in a red velvet robe embroidered with pentagrams and half-moons. The monkey bared blackened teeth at the passerby, its eyes were sewn shut, and mange or termites had eaten away half the fur, revealing shiny dark skin hard as asphalt.

Wilson stared at this grisly relic through the grime-streaked glass. A police cruiser inched by along the curb behind him; a step van full of rubber bands bounced over a pothole. A yellow banner showing a bottle of wine and a clove of garlic flapped noisily above the French restaurant next door. New city ordinances enforced banners over any other kind of sign for this district, perhaps seeking to invoke an atmosphere of medieval trade guilds and painstaking handcraftsmanship. Then, Wilson noticed the reflection of his own face in the glass, worried, specter pale.

The store formed a long, triangular cave that narrowed to a point at the back. A fat orange cat eyed Wilson from a pink pillow near the door as he stepped inside. On one wall hung cast iron cauldrons of different sizes, pewter charms in stapled Baggies, bundles of dried roots. Against the other wall, shelves of books with titles like
Rune Casting Made Easy, Orgasming with the Goddess, Witchcraft and Lesbianism, Sorcery in 101 Easy Lessons
. At the counter in the middle, a young woman sat balanced on a stool, painting her toenails. Wilson approached cautiously; he was the only customer. A loud, sonorous chanting vibrated from the sound system.

“Excuse me, I was wondering if I could ask you a favor,” Wilson began.

The young woman looked up, and Wilson forgot himself. She was very pretty, with sea green eyes and a tangle of windblown coppery hair. Her skin was tanned except for a raccoon mask of whiteness where sunglasses had been. Her lips were chapped. She wore a pair
of white cotton drawstring pants and a hooded sweatshirt that read USS
William Eaton
over the left breast. She didn't look at all like the kind of person you would expect to find working in a place like that. She looked like she belonged on the deck of a ship somewhere off the Cape Verde Islands as a fine salt spray washed over the gunwales and the sky went dark with storm.

“O.K.,” the young woman said, frowning, “speak.”

“Are you—do you … answer questions?” Wilson cast a helpless glance around at the love philters and voodoo dolls hanging from the ceiling.

“Jungle Red,” the young woman said, screwing the cap back on the bottle of nail polish and waving it in his direction. “What do you think?” She held up her newly painted toes.

“Nice,” Wilson said.

“Don't worry,” the woman said. “I can answer any questions you might have.”

Wilson took the two tarot cards out of his pocket and laid them on the counter at right angles to each other. “I found them, like that, in the street on my way home.”

“The Emperor, the Page of Wands,” she said. “Major Arcana, Minor Arcana.”

“I don't believe in any of this stuff, of course,” Wilson said, “but what the hell. Could mean something, right?”

The young woman stared up at him for a long moment with her raccoon eyes. Wilson squirmed uncomfortably beneath this scrutiny. His intellect knew a couple of cards found on the street couldn't predict the future, but his dread had other ideas.

“O.K. I'll need to find out a few things before I can give you an informed opinion,” the young woman said, nodding at the cards. “Your moon sign, your sun sign, your shoe size. Your likes and dislikes, your favorite color, the exact day, hour, and minute of your birth, whether you have any distinguishing marks on your body, whether you came out of the womb with a caul over your face or butt first.”

“A caul?”

“Yes. It's a thin membrane of embryonic tissue that in a small percentage of births covers the newborn's face when it emerges from the birth canal. A caul can mean that the child is marked by fate, that it has been signaled out for good luck or bad luck, but in either case certain sensitivities are bound to be inherent.”

“A caul … I don't know.”

“Ask your mother.”

“She's dead.”

“What about your father?”

“He's dead too,” Wilson said.

“What did he do for a living?”

“Is this relevant?” Wilson said.

“Of course,” the young woman said. “Everything is relevant.”

Wilson hesitated. “Actually, he was a gambler.”

“Professional?” She suddenly looked interested. Her eyes flickered with a secret intelligence.

“Yes,” Wilson said, slightly embarrassed.

“Was he good?”

Wilson shrugged. “He made money at it.”

“How much money?”

“Look …”

“Are you a gambler too?”

Wilson shook his head emphatically. “Not me. I work in an office.”

“You've never gambled?” She seemed disappointed.

“I've played a few hands of poker.”

“Ever lost?”

“Come to think of it, no.”

The young woman smiled, and there was something behind the smile that Wilson found uncomfortable and thrilling at once, and there was a knot in his stomach when he looked at her that was not the dread at all.

The woman pushed the cards around the glass counter with the
tips of her fingers. Her brow wrinkled in concentration. Wilson could almost hear the gears working. “Let's get on with this,” she said. “Can you tell me if you wear boxers or Jockeys?”

“Boxers,” Wilson said, before he realized that she was making fun of him. “Thanks for your help,” he said, and gathered the cards and went quickly out onto the sidewalk. But then he saw the garlic clove and wine bottle floating in the breeze next door, and he felt his stomach knot up again and he stepped back inside.

“Do you want to go to lunch?” Wilson said from the safe distance of the doorway.

“If it's someplace close,” the young woman said.

The white dining room was empty except for two old men wearing pressed seersucker jackets and striped bow ties. They ate the same pumpkin-colored soup, and might have been brothers except that they sat wrapped in their own silence at tables far removed from each other. The maître d', a tall Frenchman dressed in an expensive gray three-piece, led Wilson and the woman through the dining room onto a back patio set with five small tables and planted with rosebushes. In his suit the waiter looked more like a businessman or a lawyer than someone who worked in a restaurant.

“Usually, we have a dress code here,” he said. “That is why I sit you on the patio, O.K.?”

He left them alone with the menus and the wine list. A small fountain plashed quietly from just inside. Robins had built a nest in the ivy up the wall of the tenement building opposite. Directly across from Wilson, one of those terra-cotta sunburst masks from Mexico was cemented into the old brick. It stared at him with hollow Mexican eyes.

The young woman licked her chapped lips and read the menu. The descriptions were in French, and everything was expensive. She belonged here in the sun, it seemed to Wilson, not in the grim dreariness of the store amidst shrunken heads and books about raising the dead and conjuring demons.

“This place isn't cheap,” Wilson said.

“Then let's just get something light,” the young woman said, closing the menu. “A salad, soup. French bread and cheese.”

“Sounds good,” Wilson said.

“And a bottle of wine.”

“I don't know much about wine,” he said.

“Leave it to me.”

She glanced at the wine list and closed it with a quick snap. When she ordered, Wilson felt a wicked thrill. He thought of Andrea at the office peering at the small screen of her laptop, going over the previous day's market closings, spending hours on conference calls to the home office in Denver, as around her eyes those imperceptible lines deepened each day, her forehead worried with stress, her mouth tightened into a permanent frown.

The wine waiter brought an '82 Mont Orgeuil Côtes du Rhône; then the first food waiter brought the bread and the second food waiter brought the cheese. It was one of those restaurants where they have a half dozen waiters for every table.

The young woman's name was Cricket.

“Like the bug?” Wilson asked.

“Yes.”

“That's your real name?”

“Susan,” she said. “But people call me Cricket.”

Beneath the mane of hair, Wilson noticed heavy gold pendant earrings, set with pearls and rubies. They looked Spanish and very old and they dangled toward the table as she leaned forward to eat. She was working at the occult store as a favor to a friend and to make a little money, she said.

“Cauldron central, that's not really me. I know a little bit about
the stuff, and I guess I keep an open mind. Still, you should see the characters that come in off the street. Look like they crawled out from under a rock.”

Wilson felt hot behind the ears.

“No, I don't mean you, honey,” Cricket said. “You seem nice and normal, just a guy with a lot of worries.”

“How can you tell?”

Cricket shrugged. “In any case, I'm waiting for a ship.”

“Are you in the merchant marine?”

“No, I crew on private yachts. I do a little navigating, take care of the charts. I keep the deckhands in line.”

“I knew it,” Wilson said. “You're a sailor.”

“You could say that,” Cricket said. “I've circumnavigated the globe, like Magellan.”

“Magellan didn't make it,” Wilson said. “The natives got him in the Philippines.”

“You're gloomy,” Cricket said.

“I know.”

A third food waiter brought French country salads of endive and bacon with nuggets of goat cheese. They finished the salads quickly, then the wine a few minutes later, and Cricket signaled the wine waiter and ordered another bottle without asking Wilson. It was a '77 Château Maronne, a white Burgundy with an impressive gold-rimmed label, that the wine waiter brought out in a bucket of ice.

“This story will interest you because of your father,” Cricket said, filling up Wilson's glass.

“My father?” Wilson said.

“He was a gambler, right?”

Wilson shrugged.

As they drank and nibbled at the last of the bread, Cricket told Wilson about growing up in the Palmetto Keys, a small cluster of egg-shaped islands, mostly sand and shells and a few live oaks, fifty miles southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico.

“There's a little town called St. George on Outer Key,” she said. “That's where I was born. My father owned a hotel and a charter boat service there, which made him about the only man around with a steady job that didn't have anything to do with gambling. I hear tourism is the thing now. In those days, before they changed the law, it was gambling. The keys are owned half by Florida and half by Alabama. For years, on the Alabama side, high-stakes private poker games were legal. Maybe your father played down there.”

“He preferred the horses,” Wilson said.

“In any case, you could gamble for millions of dollars as long as you didn't run a casino,” Cricket said, “which meant you didn't employ anybody and you did it out of your own house—and about every weekend, gangster types with big wads of cash would come down from places like New Orleans and Miami, and even Chicago or New York, and there would be these big poker games in the fancy private houses along the lagoon on the leeward side. After my parents got divorced, my father spent a lot of time over there with one of the local gamblers called Johnny Mazep, who ran a high-stakes game every Sunday from September to May.