The Pirate's Daughter (21 page)

The doctor's story was an unfortunate one. He was Swiss by birth, educated at the University of Lausanne and at the University of Michigan's medical school. After fifteen years of lucrative practice in London and Geneva, he had burned out on rich people with bad hearts and decided to do a year of charity work at the Nursing Sisters of the Cross hospital in Tananarive on the island of Madagascar. The Malagasy people, with a diet heavy in salted beef, coconut oil, and macassar nuts, have one of the highest incidents of heart disease in the world.

“Understand, I'm used to tidy Swiss cantons where everybody's in bed by nine”—Dr. Boursaly continued—“pine forests where the underbrush has been carefully swept out of sight. In Geneva, as you may have heard, they distribute needles to our few dozen heroin addicts in a certain park. These people are not just addicts, mind
you, but Swiss addicts. The addicts shoot up there in the park around eight in the evening and hang out till midnight. But when children walk through to school in the morning, the park is spotless. Needles and spoons and so forth have been picked up and thrown away, not by city sanitation workers but by the addicts themselves. This is Switzerland. Do you understand?”

Wilson said he did.

“In the end, all this tidiness began to grate on me, so I decided on Madagascar, which sounded like a place of marvelous strangeness. In that country every October the natives dig up their ancestors, who have been mummified, wrapped in tar-soaked mats, and buried. They take these tarry, rotting corpses to dinner, out dancing, get into cabs, sleep with them. I had to see this for myself, so I went to Madagascar, and I made many friends there and had a very interesting time. But I'll say this—Madagascar is not an easy place, and after two years, I needed an extended vacation. So a few of my friends and I rented an Arab dhow and attempted to sail across the straits to Zanzibar. Halfway there our dhow was attacked and taken by pirates off the
Storm Car
. I was saved because the Brotherhood needed a doctor. My friends were tied to the railings and the dhow was scuttled and I heard them screaming for help as it went down, and there was nothing I could do.”

The doctor lowered his eyes. The gin flush in his cheeks faded. Suddenly he seemed sober, and he poured the remainder of his gin into the nearest urn full of flowers and stood for a full minute, hands in the pockets of his doctor's smock, staring into the distance. Then he turned around, and his face looked pale and masklike. “A prison doesn't need to have four walls and bars to be a prison,” he said. “You'll soon discover that. And you too will begin to drink like me, like everyone else in this paradise of monsters.”

Something, a heat shimmer in the sky, a dark cloud obscuring the horizon, told Wilson this was true.

The stiffness in Wilson's knees gradually disappeared. After a few weeks, he was able to go about the shanty city with Dr. Boursaly. At first his eyes could not grow accustomed to the misery he saw there, then one morning, all at once, he became inured to the sufferings of others. A hot African wind blew the stench hard against the island, the tropical sun hung like a yellow grapefruit in the relentless blue sky, and as the doctor had predicted, Wilson began to drink.

Hard against the fence of the barracoon stood Quatre Sables's business district. Here an alley of rusty tin-sided rumshops intersected with a wider street of brothels and other commercial concerns. There were money changers' tents, stalls that sold vegetables, pawnshops, a booth in which a sort of Punch and Judy show with shadow puppets ran continuously. Twice a week, old men spread blankets full of ruta—giant African turnips, the dietary staple of the island—along the muddy banks that passed for a sidewalk. The accepted medium of exchange was the cowrie shell, American cigarettes, and any type of money—given value by the locals according to size and color rather than denomination. Large bright bills from Italy and France would fetch more ruta than U.S. greenbacks worth ten times their value.

Wilson and the doctor spent several hours of each day at the Black Spot, a tin-sided, open-front rumshop run by a Jamaican ex-pirate who called himself Ben Gunn after the old pirate in
Treasure island
. A warped piece of plywood set on rusty fifty-gallon oil drums served for the bar; packing crates and empty five-gallon paint tubs, for chairs and tables. The drink of choice at this establishment was rumfustian, a noxious mixture of native beer, gin, and a sort of sherry made from wild berries. A half pound of cowrie shells would buy a dirty plastic milk jug full of the stuff. Wilson drank his
rumfustian out of a chipped, handleless coffee mug. The doctor did not bother with such niceties, swilling the stuff straight from the jug. A Bupandan tinka band played on a platform of tires and cardboard boxes across the way. The pleasant lilting music rose with the heat into the hot blue sky.

Today, Wilson listened to the music and watched the crowds pass along the street. At that hour of the afternoon, the place was empty except for a couple of drunks passed out facedown on the muddy floor. Ben Gunn sat propped on a three-legged stool behind the bar, big marijuana spliff smoldering between his teeth, his eyes red with the stuff. His hair hung down in gnarled dreadlocks, tied at the end with bedraggled bits of ribbon; his skin showed the unhealthy color of burnt coffee. Roaches the size of Wilson's hand ran out of the rusty barrels and over the plywood counter. Ben Gunn ignored them.

Dr. Boursaly assured Wilson that dengue fever did not affect the liver permanently and ordered another milk jug of rumfustian. He carried about ten pounds of cowrie shells and assorted Italian bills in a worn black medical bag held together with duct tape, which he kept nestled safely between his knees.

“I told you there's nothing to do on this island but drink,” Dr. Boursaly said to Wilson when Ben Gunn straggled over with the fresh jug.

“Maybe for you,” Wilson said. “But I'm getting out of here as soon as Cricket comes back.”

Dr. Boursaly shook his head. “Except for the Thirty Captains not one of us gets off this island for good. It's too much of an international secret. Can you see the headlines in the
New York Times?
‘Pirate Paradise Discovered off African Coast—Slave Trade Alive and Well'? The decadent nations of the West would have to do something. And that wouldn't please certain people in certain circles in Europe and America and Japan who make quite a bit of money off this place.”

“I still can't believe it,” Wilson said with a loose gesture indicating the activity of the waterfront. “Pirates! Thousands of them. And
the Thirty Captains sound like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Who are they? Where do they come from?”

“They are the ruined men of all nations,” Dr. Boursaly said. “The hunted refugees of all vanquished parties, everyone that is wretched and daring. And where is there not misery and vice in this unhappy age?… I'm quoting, but you get the idea. It's nothing new, of course; these rat's nests spring up like weeds at the edge of the world. Think of the great pirate republic of Port Royal, Jamaica, in the seventeenth century; think of New Providence and Tortuga in the eighteenth, of Campeche and Key West in the nineteenth. In any case, pirates below the rank of captain who decide to retire from the bloody trade can only do so here at Quatre Sables. There's a sort of retirement community on the other side of the island, a little village with a sulfur spring, full of aging buccaneers. Pegleg Bay they call it. If the men refuse the honor of living there, the only other option is a watery grave.”

“The mon's right,” Ben Gunn called over from the bar. “There's no land for us Brothers of the Coast but right here at Quatre Sables. An' when we die, there's still a watery grave to rest our bones. It's in the Articles, mon. Dead shipmates are always buried at sea.”

“But you are a different case, Wilson.” Dr. Boursaly leaned across the jug of rumfustian and lowered his tone. “So terribly different. I'm worried that you might not make it to retirement.”

Wilson felt the back of his neck prickle. “Oh, Christ …” he murmured.

“Of course it's none of my business, but I understand your Mistress Page is already spoken for.”

“Aye, mon, she's the Portugee's woman,” Ben called from the bar. “The Portugee's no one to fuck with.”

“Shut up, Ben,” the doctor said.

“Who is this Portugee?” Wilson said.

“He's chairman of the Council of Thirty Captains, he—”

“No.” Wilson made a quick chopping motion. “I don't want to know. Whatever comes.”

The doctor shrugged.

“It's a wise mon that don't worry about the sky gonna fall,” Ben Gunn said from behind the bar. “ 'Cause no hat's gonna save his po' head from the big pieces.”

Three nights later, Dr. Boursaly barged into the bathroom of the house on the ridge as Wilson took a cool bath in the big marble tub. The doctor's eyes were wild and excited, his clothes in disarray. As usual he reeked of alcohol.

“Don't you knock?” Wilson said.

“I couldn't,” Dr. Boursaly said. “There are no doors in this place. Dry off and put on your clothes. Something I want you to see.”

“We're going out?”

“Yes.”

Wilson had never been through the shanty city on foot after dark, had in fact been warned against it by the doctor himself. “Isn't it a little dangerous?” he said.

The doctor waved a dismissive hand. “With all the infectious microbes floating in the air here, even breathing is dangerous.”

They walked down through the rustling, shadowy streets to the barracoon. When they came through the barbed wire into the compound, Wilson saw an unusual sort of activity around the concrete hangars where the slaves were kept. Men in business suits milled about the entrance or stood talking in subdued groups of three or four. The great wooden doors were open, harsh white light spilling from within. Floods lit the bare cinder blocks. Wilson heard the
sputter and burp of generators and caught the sharp reek of gasoline in the air.

“What's going on?” he said.

“It's the night of the big dance,” Dr. Boursaly said. “I'm the doctor on call in case anyone breaks an ankle.”

Inside the hangar spotlights shone down from the rafters, and the air smelled of sweat and wax and disinfectant, very much like a high school gym. Bleachers rose up one wall over a polished wooden platform about half the size of a basketball court. Wilson and the doctor took a seat at the corner of the bleachers in the front row and waited. Soon an evil odor, half submerged beneath the disinfectant, announced itself to Wilson's nose.

“They're moving up from the pens,” the doctor said. “You can smell them coming. Clean the place from top to bottom, spray it with heavy chemicals, still won't get that stench out. If I believed in God, I'd say the whole island stinks to high heaven.”

After a few minutes, the bleachers began to fill. Wilson turned and looked back at the crowd and saw clean-shaven white faces hanging like half-moons above crisp white shirts and power ties; Japanese executives hunched over calculators; Arab merchants dressed in Savile Row elegance, diamond rings flashing from their fingers. And he heard the hushed, self-important mutter of the universal language in which business is done.

Soon, the first lot came up for sale: ten young Bupu men chained together from the neck and ankles, stainless steel links gleaming like coins in the white light. Sitting barely thirty feet away, Wilson could see the despair in the eyes of these young Africans, could smell the raw fear lift off their skin in waves. The second one from the end dropped to his knees suddenly and began to call on his God in a loud, hysterical shrieking but was whipped to his feet again. The bidding proceeded in English, in American dollars, and was simultaneously translated into a dozen languages through portable headsets. The auctioneer, a stout Englishman wearing a tuxedo, spoke with an
educated accent, but his was the brutish cant of auctioneers everywhere.

“A coffle of ten strong black bucks for the field,” he announced, “what am I bid? All healthy, certified by our company doctors and guaranteed for six months of hard labor, barring accidents. Good Bupu stock, straight from the bush. Do I hear a hundred thousand dollars?”

The businessmen in the stands raised discreet pencils, and the bidding spiraled upward. The first lot of ten men went for just over seventy-five thousand. The second lot, seven large Andas from a mountain clan known for their endurance, went for half as much more. Over the next few hours more than eight hundred African men, women, and children were sold to sober-suited representatives of the great industrialized nations of the East and West.

When Wilson could speak, he turned to Dr. Boursaly in horror. “How could this go on?” he said under his breath, his voice trembling. “How could—” He choked on his words.

Dr. Boursaly shrugged. “You're looking at the global economy at work, my friend,” he said. “The world's multinational corporations—I am talking about manufacturers of everything from computer components to blue jeans—need cheap labor to keep the overhead low. What's cheaper than a slave? No need to pay benefits, health insurance, vacations, all the rest of it. Makes perfect economic sense, really.”

“But where do they go?” Wilson managed. “Where are the factories, the fields?”

The doctor leaned close. “There are certain factory islands in the South Pacific,” he said in a whisper. “And off the coast of Africa and Central America and in the Java Sea. Anywhere the local government is corrupt and easily bribed to look the other way. How, you might ask, has all this been kept a big secret from the community of civilized nations? No one likely to talk gets off Quatre Sables, true, but there are always leaks. Look at it this way—maybe it's not such a big secret. Maybe the community of civilized nations just
doesn't want to know. It is perhaps a commonplace to say so, but as long as everyone has their television sets and automobiles and all the rest, who cares what happens to a few hundred thousand poor wretches out of Africa? Speaking for myself, I don't particularly want to know about much more than the next drink.”