The Pirate's Daughter (22 page)

After the auction men in white jackets and bow ties set up a catered party along the quay. Long draped tables were quickly covered with silver platters of lobster and caviar, pheasant under glass, suckling pig, great slabs of roast beef. Ice sculpture swans dripped in the equatorial heat. The bar showed a full array of fine wines and liquor. Champagne streamed out of a plastic fountain. Colored lights decorating the prows of corporate yachts glimmered in the dark water. Wilson saw the
Compound Interest
moored among them, listing a little to the starboard.

“When was the last time you had caviar on this damned island?” Dr. Boursaly said, and plunged into the crowd of businessmen.

Wilson felt sick to his stomach and sick at heart. He downed a shot of straight bourbon to steady his nerves and looked out across the bright cluster of white yachts and across the shimmering water toward Africa and saw a familiar darkness blooming there, a darkness that would soon cover the earth: Civilizations lasted barely a moment in the long day of history; the lives of men and women were as good as wasted on behalf of order. Chaos lurked always, a beast in the shadows just beyond the campfire, biding its time. One day there was regular mail service, the churches were full, with the flip of a switch pleasant light illuminated a room—the next day great cities lay in ruins, and the cry of the wolf was heard again upon the moor. Musing upon such melancholy thoughts, Wilson hardly noticed
when a man in a business suit came to stand at his elbow. He took in the jacket of fine navy blue silk, the red paisley tie, the gold Rolex before he recognized the face.

“Feeling better, Wilson?” the man said. “I heard you were sick.” It was Ackerman.

“Didn't recognize you without your glasses,” Wilson said when he regained his composure. It was a ridiculous statement, but he could think of nothing else to say.

“I've got my contact lenses in,” Ackerman said, smiling. “Never wear my glasses when I'm doing business.” He looked fit; his cheeks showed a healthy, ruddy color. He put a paternalistic hand on Wilson's shoulder. “How are they treating you?”

“Fine,” Wilson said, “you?”

“Actually, I'm pretty good,” Ackerman said. “This guy Captain Page is really quite an entrepreneur. That billion he wanted for my ransom, I convinced him to put it to work for the both of us.” Then he began talking quickly, a monied gleam in his eye. “The trade the Brotherhood's got going here is fantastic, a stroke of genius, good for everyone. We get rich and relieve population pressures in Africa at the same time. Beautiful, pure unadulterated capitalism at work. If you ask me—”

“Do you know what happened to Captain Amundsen?” Wilson interrupted.

Ackerman's smile faded. He looked into his drink and blinked at the
Compound Interest
moored down the quay. “I heard. He was a good man. It's really too bad he wouldn't join us.”

When Ackerman looked back, he saw something in Wilson's face and began to back away.

“Murderer!” Wilson cried. “Slaver! They're human beings, not units of merchandise!” At this a few businessmen stopped eating and looked in Wilson's direction.

“S-slavery is a value-laden term,” Ackerman stuttered, “and it's not entirely accurate. We prefer uncompensated labor or coerced manpower, or—”

Wilson didn't wait for Ackerman to finish. He lunged forward and closed his hands around the billionaire's throat and squeezed as hard as he could. Ackerman's eyes registered shock, then they began to bulge slightly, and one contact came rolling out like a large round tear. In the next second two of the bartenders pulled Wilson away. Gasping for breath, Ackerman fell back against a table full of suckling pig and slid to the pavement. Wilson heard the man's silk trousers rip.

Dr. Boursaly hurried over and put an arm around Wilson's shoulder. “Come with me, quickly,” he said into Wilson's ear, and led him through the crowd and up the hill through the darkness of the shanty city. When they were halfway up, Wilson stopped and squatted in the mud and dug his knuckles in his eyes and wept soundlessly. Dr. Boursaly squatted beside him and lit a cigarette.

“I'm going to do something about that,” Wilson said when he stopped weeping, and he actually shook his fist in the direction of the barracoon. “One way or another I'm going to stop that shit, I swear it.”

“That's what I thought when I first came here,” Dr. Boursaly said glumly. “But what can any one of us do against their machine? It's all we can do to stay alive. Sorry I brought you along with me tonight. Didn't know it would inspire such a
crise de conscience
.” He fell silent; there was nothing more to say.

The black hemisphere of the bay was pricked out with the running lights of freighters awaiting a cargo of human flesh.

The rainy season started with an odd greenish glow in the sky. Heavy purple clouds gathered against the green like disapproving deities in a Greek play, but for days there was no rain at all, just an oppressive humidity so thick the air felt like quicksand. Heat lightning flashed obscure messages on the horizon, and from somewhere far away came the beating of tribal drums. Then, all at once, in the middle of the night it began to rain. The sky opened up, and buckets of the stuff poured down. Wilson woke to the thunderous noise of the water and lay sweating in the big bed beneath the mosquito netting, listening to a chorus of screaming from the shanty city.

At dawn, he rose to the window to see that half the slope had been washed down into the bay, its black water stained red by a tide of mud and garbage.

“Happens every year like this,” Dr. Boursaly said when he came up for his breakfast gin at ten. “Between five and ten thousand will die from exposure in the next few months. In May they'll rebuild again, and there will be more brown babies born on garbage heaps, and thousands more of the wretched floating over from Africa, and the whole bloody miserable cycle continues.”

They sat at the polished oak table in the dining room. Rain had torn ragged holes in the striped awning of the patio; large water stains spread across the kitchen ceiling; water dripped into aluminum pots set on the tile floor. The doctor finished his first gin, gave out a melancholy sigh, and poured another—no different from any other morning. But Wilson felt a sudden rush of revulsion and realized he could no longer abide the man.

“Doctor, have you ever tried to get off the island?” Wilson said, an irritated edge in his voice.

Dr. Boursaly registered the accusation and sighed again. “You
mean, escape? How could I?” he said. “We're sealed up tighter than a fortress here,” but when he took his next drink, his hand shook.

“There's got to be a way,” Wilson said. “It's a goddamned island. If all those poor bastards can float over from Africa, it seems to me, someone could float in the opposite direction, maybe tell the authorities about this place.”

The doctor said nothing; his red eyes looked out wearily from thick red-rimmed lids that made Wilson think of a turtle in its shell. The vein in the doctor's nose pulsed out a gentle rhythm of despair.

Wilson felt sorry for the man, but there was something in the air, a curious pressure, and he couldn't stop himself.

“Here's what I think, Doctor,” Wilson said. “I think you've been a drunk for years. I think that's why you left Switzerland, and that's why you've never tried to get off the island. You belong here. Who's going to notice a drunken doctor in the midst of all this squalor?” Wilson knew this for the truth as soon as he said it. He regretted the statement, but it was too late.

Dr. Boursaly rose unsteadily, with as much dignity as he could muster, and ran a hand through his thinning brown hair.

“I understand,” he said. “The rainy season. There have been studies. The unusually dense atmosphere puts hydraulic pressure on certain chemicals in the brain. I get that way myself, snappish, irritable, everyone a nuisance. I'll see you in three months when the weather clears.”

Then he finished his drink in a quick gulp and went through the kitchen and out into the rain.

Over the next few weeks it rained every day from dawn to dusk and on into the night, and Wilson read
Don Quixote
, Caulaincourt's
With Napoleon in Russia
, and
Manon Lescaut
—the last of the books he had brought with him from his old life. The only book of any interest he found in the house was a copy of Rimbaud's poems that contained a short biography of the poet: After a wild youth of madness and excess Rimbaud had exiled himself to Africa, entered the slave trade, married an Abyssinian woman. Somehow the most egotistical of men from a nation known for its egotism had forgotten all about himself under the hot African sun. Twenty dusty years later, when he lay dying from a cancerous leg in Marseilles and was already famous in Paris, he could hardly remember that he had ever written a single poem.

Africa has that effect on the urban temperament, Wilson decided. A sort of deadening lethargy descends, you perfect the art of staring at the wall, and one day blurs into the next. So it was not possible for him to say how many more weeks passed before Cricket came home again from the sea. One morning, purple sky full of rain over the island, the muddy streets impassible and awash with garbage, Wilson awoke to hear noises coming from the big bathroom. He put on a robe and went to investigate and found Cricket taking a bath in the tub beneath the skylight. The rain light made green shadows in the room, and the water in the tub was strewn with delicate pink and yellow rose petals.

“Hello, Wilson, sweet,” Cricket said when he came up. She smiled a lazy smile and made small splashing noises with her fingers. “I told that drunk if you weren't well when I got back, there would be hell to pay. Are you well?”

Wilson said nothing and looked at her body through the water. The rose petals obscured his view.

“Where did you find roses on this island?” he said finally.

“They come out of a package, from France,” Cricket said, adjusting herself in the tub. “They're freeze-dried, look like little turds. Put them in the water and poof—rose petals. But is that all you have to say? It's been three months. Aren't you even happy to see me?”

“Yes, it's good to see you,” Wilson said, but he didn't move out of the doorway.

“Sorry it took so long, honey,” Cricket said. “We had some trouble in Bupanda. There's a war going on, you know. Can be a little hard to do business. And I'm sorry for a lot of other things too.…” She held out her arms, and the green rain light shimmered along them like static electricity. “During all the nastiness over there,” she whispered, “all I thought about was getting back to you. I thought about how sad I would be if you died.”

Wilson dropped his robe and stepped into the tub. The water was warm on his thighs, and Cricket lay back, floating among the petals like Ophelia, and she closed her eyes and didn't make a sound. For Wilson, it was like guilt. Making love to her had the sweet, dreadful savor of sleeping with another man's wife. She was part of this pirate hell; she was implicated. Now, by accepting her body, he was implicated too. His brain and his heart knew this, but he couldn't stop himself, and the razor of his conscience lent the undeniable thrill of pain to the act. Afterward they lay half submerged in the tepid water, rose petals stuck to their skin.

“Cricket, we need to talk,” Wilson said.

“Not now, sweet,” Cricket said sleepily. “It's so nice just floating here with you. Listen to the rain on the roof.”

“Now,” Wilson said.

They followed the shell drive that made up the single road of the ridge settlement, past the homes of the Thirty Captains set back among the tamarinds. Wilson had never seen anyone pass along here, and with a few exceptions the white houses were shuttered and closed.

“They're all in London or Miami or somewhere this time of year,” Cricket said. “It's only hardworking old Dad who pulls a raid going into the rainy season.”

The rain poured buckets and then let up for a bit. A few cars stood under canvas covers along the drive; Wilson recognized the familiar silhouette of a Mercedes-Benz. A big tabby cat crouched underneath it, just behind the front wheels. Cricket made a plaintive mewing sound; the cat mewed back but would not venture out across the wet shell gravel.

“That's Petey,” Cricket said. “Used to be the ship's cat aboard the
Esperance
, Evan Matthews's tub. He's another Palmetto scrub like Dad. Matthews ran into an Argentine coast guard cutter off the Maldives awhile back. The cutter went down after a pretty hairy fight, but so did the
Esperance
. Captain Matthews and Petey for breakfast and two other sailors—all that was left of the crew—floated around in a rubber raft for a week, and were just about to eat poor Petey before they were picked up. When they got back here, Captain Matthews retired him, but you know, I think that cat misses the life of a pirate.”

Cricket and Wilson walked on in silence, and the shell drive became a rutted trail that wound up the ridge through a thicket of scrub and brush grass and into a patch of jungle that was like going into a long green tunnel. They folded their umbrellas. The heavy-leaved trees protected them from the rain. Small orange monkeys scuttled about in the green dimness; black-scaled lizards ran up the
rough bark. A quarter mile further on, the trail passed out into an open space along the ridge, a rocky outcropping that faced the interior of the island.

Wilson had never been this far up, and he was surprised by what he saw below. The ridge sloped down to a jungle-covered valley that gave way to open, cultivated land about three miles off. There were rice paddies and orchards full of mangoes and banana trees, rich black squares of fallow earth, carefully tended stone walls. A straight road led to a massive-looking country house of ancient stone. Wilson's fix on architecture was vague, but he put the building at fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Spanish or Portuguese, probably the fortified residence of some long-gone colonial governor. Nicely tended green lawns led down to a reflecting pool and the clipped hedge cones of a classical garden. Wilson did not need to be told who owned this estate, but Cricket squeezed his hand and told him anyway.