The Perfidious Parrot (15 page)

The driver was happy. “This is
it
, sir.” The commissaris agreed. Perhaps he should stay here on Aruba. He could send for Turtle. Katrien could stay behind with the grandchildren. They could E-mail each other.

In order to defuse music-generated tensions the hostesses took their pleasurably excited clients to the café’s back rooms. Margarita escorted a red-headed first mate in his splendid whites. Bartenders busily pumped draft beer, creating immaculate white-cuffed glasses of golden fluid. Waiters rushed about carrying trays of broiled snapper and grouper.

“The band leader is a guru,” the driver said. “He realized his true nature in Amsterdam. Because they still know shit there he came to us.”

“Ach,” the commissaris said. He had been cleaning his eyeglasses, blaming possible dirt or steam for the appearance of a halo above the catlike man’s head. “And what does he do when he isn’t making mystic music here?”

“He gambles in the Hilton.”

“He wins?”

“He loses,” the driver said.

“Thank you,” the commissaris said before leaving the Sabaneta bar. He passed a hundred dollar note to the band leader. “You play wonderful music.”

“Specially composed and performed for your benefit, Commissaris.”

The commissaris failed to recognize the guru.

“I used to call myself ‘Puss in Boots,’ ”
*
the singer said, pointing at his high leather shoewear. “Amsterdam North, twenty years ago. I kept busy keeping unemployed assholes busy, on the dike. Steal and share. Remember that time, sir? You did not agree with my idealism. Made me do some jail time. To take care of karma I worked for National Assistance for quite some years but what I do now seems more suited to my mission.”

“I came to see a captain Guzberto Souza of a pirated supertanker, the
Sibylle
,” the commissaris said.

The percussionist touched his gourds. The trumpets blared, the guitar trembled. The commissaris’s spine began to vibrate again. The sensation became almost unbearable when the singer started his thin brittle singing.

The commissaris bowed.

The guru nodded.

“Bad behavior,” the driver said, starting the Mercedes. “But he is out of it. Good musicians usually are. I would be if I could make good music.” Unfortunately the driver was no musician. He did have the Judds on CD. He had done that much.

“Divi-divi trees,” the driver said while the Mercedes drove slowly along a dusty Aruban country road to avoid straying goats. “The monsoon pushed them over, it always blows from the same side, but they never quite go low enough to touch the ground.”

“Beautiful,” the commissaris said. The trees were more like bushes in a dried-out landscape, sandy with some rocks and clusters of thorny low-growing plants. The commissaris admired some giant blossoming cacti. Small thrushes looked from black nest-holes in ten-foot-tall pale green stems. Other small birds drank nectar from the white cactus flowers. Ramshackle cabins showed up along the road, behind fences put together from odd sized twigs. Dogs scratched themselves lazily in the shadow of parched fir trees. Children stared from sagging porches. The driver said that the island was once covered with forest, that water welled from between the rocks and was drunk by deer and rabbits. How did he know that? Because those
animals had been drawn on cave walls. By whom? By Arawak natives. The Arawaks fled Venezuela, pursued by their enemies, the Caribs. The cannibalistic Caribs came after the Arawaks, killed them off, and ate them. Columbus came after the Caribs and massacred them. Eating the Caribs wasn’t necessary, there was plenty of pork and fish and the Bible did not prescribe eating Caribs.

The driver knew what the Bible prescribed, he had been to Bible school in Curaçao. He knew the book by heart. The Bible prescribed manslaughter only.

“And after Columbus, you came,” the driver said. “White Dutchmen massacred the Spanish. I would have liked to have seen that. My granddaddies did, you brought my granddaddies from Africa. They must have been sickly, you couldn’t sell them stateside. So we got to live here and sell you drugs and Margaritas.

The commissaris sighed.

The driver sighed too.

Solange, wife of Emilio Souza (but she had applied for divorce she told the commissaris), was small and graceful, with long braids. She wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt. She spoke English with a Mexican accent. Her small house was plastered and whitewashed under a roof of baked red tiles. It was surrounded by a large vegetable garden, fenced with barbed wire to keep out goats and long-legged chickens. “The house is in my name,” Solange said. “The chingado bailiff didn’t want to believe me so I had to hire a chingado lawyer.”

She breathed deeply. “Emilio Souza,
el chingado
.”

Solange served lemonade, made with the fruit of her own lemon tree. “You guys looking for Guzberto? Fifty bucks is not
enough, señores.” She laughed sadly. “A woman alone.” Two little girls had been dropped off by a small schoolbus. They came trotting down the path, swinging their cloth bags. “Three women alone. You know what the chingado lawyer charged me to write this?” She showed them a letter. She rubbed her hips. “You know what my income is? No? Minimal unemployed single caregiver allowance. We could starve without the veggies and the chickies. You know what the chingado bailiff and the chingado lawyer asked me? ‘Amor, amor, how do you do it?’ You know what I said? I said nothing because they were on top of me.”

She crossed her arms defensively. “So now what do you want me to say?”

The commissaris had floated away on Solange’s stream of words. The question shocked him back. “Hello. Yes.” What was it he wanted her to say? Right. “Do you,” he asked solemnly, “know where we can find your brother-in-law, Captain Guzberto Souza, master of the supertanker
Sibylle
? If so, would you tell us please?”

“Not for fifty bucks.” The woman looked at her small bare feet. “I could have told you earlier but then you wouldn’t have come here.” She addressed the driver. “You with your dumb talk, man. Holy silver money. Golden potatoes. Where do you get that dumb talk, man?”

“I am a poet,” the driver said. “I didn’t want to insult you. I talk that way. I think you are a goddess.”

She made a fist.

“I think you are a goddess too,” the commissaris said. He asked for an envelope and if he could use her bathroom. She brought him the envelope from the lawyer’s letter and showed
him the way to the outhouse behind the garden. The panels of the structure had been filled in with the ribs of palm fronds held by neatly made frames of narrow boards, individually sawn out of driftwood. The outhouse roof was fitted together with odd pieces of corrugated iron, of different rusty colors, a metal quilt of sepias and tender rose and red shades. A cracked but gleaming toilet bowl stood on a fundament of orange cement blocks. “A work of art, ma’am,” the commissaris said, feeling guilty, for his own garden was a weed field and its toolshed, since the last windstorm, had been leaning against a fence that was ready to topple over too. “Emilio thought it up,” Solange said. “He can start things but he can’t finish them.”

“You made it?”

“I make everything here.”

Solange pointed at her gardens. “I have a septic system, it makes the vegetables grow, and it does rain sometimes. I save the water. See, the gutter? The drums? There is a cistern too. Someday I’ll get the pump fixed maybe.”

The commissaris used the outhouse and came back with the envelope. “Here you are.”

“Can I look?”

“After we leave please,” the commissaris said. “It’s more than fifty dollars, ma’am.”

“Guzberto was taken to the clinic of the nun, Sister Meshti,” Solange said. “His legs had to be cut off and he kept shivering and crying. Guz smoked bad cigars that made his veins shrink but he said it didn’t matter because he was drinking too and the alcohol made them swell up again. Not true either.” Solange’s head shook until her braids swung above her small head. “More macho shit.”

The commissaris thanked her. He got into the car. “To Sister Meshti’s clinic if you please.” The Mercedes was turning out of the driveway when the driver looked in his rear mirror. “Solange is running after us. You want me to stop?” The commissaris opened his window. Solange was crying. “I never told you, Guzberto is dead.” She pushed the envelope into the car. “Here. I don’t want it.”

The commissaris got out. He returned the envelope and hugged her softly. “There, there, dear.”

She whispered in his ear. “Too much
chingado
money.” She kissed his cheek. “You are an angel hiding under a piss pot.”

He took off the pith helmet and offered it to her. Maybe her daughters would like to play with the thing. But she said that he needed to keep his head covered, the sun might give him cancer, his hair was so thin.

“What was going on?” the driver asked.

“Happens to me all the time,” the commissaris said. “Women come on to me. My wife thinks it is charisma.”

“Really,” the driver said.

The clinic where Captain Guzberto Souza lost first his legs and later his life was a wooden barn set precariously on the slope of a hill. A covered passage led to a cave. The Mother Superior was a thin German standing on large bare feet. She wore a gray cotton dress under a stiff white hood. An unvarnished insect-eaten cross hung against her flat chest. Her unfocused eyes were protected by thick eyeglasses. Her wrinkled face was burned a deep tan. “Yes, dear?” Her mouth held few teeth.

“The Capitan Guzberto Souza,” the commissaris said. “I
would like to know if he told you something about his ship being attacked by pirates.”

“Zey still exist?” the nun asked, “Ze piraten?”

“They stole the oil,” the commissaris explained, “that the Capitan was transporting in his tanker.”

“Zat is why ze Kapitan had no money?” Sister Meshti asked. “I did not understand. Kapitane earn good money.”

The commissaris and the driver were taken to the nuns’s living quarters within the cool cave. They sat on straight-backed cane chairs around a heavy square table. A young nun brought glasses and a plastic jar filled with iced tea.

“Sister Johanna,” Sister Meshti said.

Sister Johanna spoke the soft Dutch of southern Holland. “Guzberto was a nice man. I got to wash him every day. Never gave me any trouble.”

“He had no legs zen,” Sister Meshti said. “We zought we could save ze Kapitan but ze poor fellow got fevers and ze antibiotics did nuzzing and his condition was very bad.” She looked sad. “All ze Kapitan wanted was gin but we don’t give zat.”

“Strange,” the commissaris said. “Piracy of his ship, must have been a traumatic event, yet he never told you about it.”

“Poor man was sick,” Sister Meshti said. “Bad wizdrawal.”

Sister Johanna spoke up. “Guz was bothered by big black frogs.” She indicated how big the frogs had been. As big as Sister Meshti. “And afterward Guz’s toes would itch and I had to scratch them. He had no toes. I scratched anyway, under the sheets at the foot of the bed.
Zkrrtzch, Zkrrtzhch
. He always felt better afterward.”

Sister Johanna blew her nose in a red bandanna. “Guz was
frightened of the big black frogs. They were all wet and they attacked him.”

“You were paid for taking care of the poor Kapitan?” the commissaris asked Sister Meshti.

She shook her head. “Guz had no insurance. Ze shipping people did not pay eizer.” She found a folder and looked through its papers. “Ambagt & Son.”

“Nobody paid for the work you did here?”

“Nobody,” said Sister Meshti.

“God did not pay either?”

“Who?” Sister Meshti asked.

Sister Meshti said that she and Johanna sometimes went begging, in their donkey cart. They called on the accountants of the hotels and casinos. She usually got some money out of the accountants, she had been an accountant herself, long ago, in Cologne, where she was in charge of the administration of a chemical concern. She liked numbers. She did not have too many numbers to take care of now. “But zat’s okay.”

“Surely
you
know who God is,” the commissaris told sister Johanna.

“Who?” asked Sister Johanna, smiling sweetly.

“Do you have an envelope?” the commissaris asked Sister Meshti. “And could I use your bathroom please?”

“You don’t work for the firm that employed that no good Captain Souza do you?” the driver asked after they had left the clinic, where they were waved out by the happy nuns.

The commissaris said that he had been hired by detectives to do some research.

“Why were those nuns all over you?” the driver asked.

“Nuns are women,” the commissaris said. “It’s because of my charismatic presence. Even that Margarita liked me.”

“Really,” the driver said, stepping on the gas, for the commissaris was in a hurry to get back to his chartered Learjet. “Pity we couldn’t locate that drunk for you, but I did have a nice day. Just pay me a hundred. The gasoline is free.”

“You have an envelope?” the commissaris said. “You can open it after the plane takes off.”

“And it will be empty,” the driver said suspiciously. “Listen here, sir. I’m no woman in need of appreciation. You know what I am? I am a pimp and a drug dealer. Guys like you give me nothing.”

The commissaris passed him a hundred dollar bill.

The driver passed it back.

“You prefer the envelope?” the commissaris asked.

The driver found one on the airport. The commissaris took it to the airport’s bathroom. “Don’t open the envelope before my plane leaves,” the commissaris said as he gave it to the driver. “Thank you for putting up with me all day. What is your name please?”

The driver was called Maurice Mazlof.

“Goodbye Mr. Mazlof.”

The driver stood to attention while the Learjet pierced low clouds. Back in the Mercedes he opened the envelope. It was filled with folded toilet paper.