The Pirate's Daughter (11 page)

The sky above the sails brightened. A dull purple grew on the horizon, and the running lights began to dim. A button on the navigational console blinked on and off three times. Captain Amundsen threw up his hands.

“These damn computers,” he said. “They tell me dawn is coming as if I couldn't see it for myself.” He stood, made some quick adjustments, and turned to Wilson. “You'd better get below. Get some sleep. It'll start soon enough.”

Just as Wilson reached the hatchway, the wind picked up and the sails spread themselves above like wings, and in that breathy silence peculiar to wind and sail, the vessel heeled in a straight run toward morning.

The
Compound Interest
was temporary home to four human beings and a rumor, Dwight Ackerman. Wilson spent hours every morning toiling beneath the iron thumb of a diminutive Vietnamese cook named Nguyen, but the man they cooked for didn't seem to exist outside the prodigious appetite that made Wilson's presence on the ship necessary.

They fed their invisible master like a wild animal in the zoo. Once a day, a little after noon, Nguyen delivered a massive tray of food into the mouth of Ackerman's cave—the forward suite of stateroom
and office from which the billionaire never emerged. The plates came back an hour later, licked clean. Wilson pictured a freak the size of a house stuffed into the bow of the ship, a behemoth wearing a polo shirt big as a tent, arms like joints of ham. Or nothing, a devouring void.

The routine was always the same. Wilson rose bleary-eyed at 5:00
A.M
. and stumbled through the gloom to the galley. Still half asleep, he attempted to decipher instructions written in yellow chalk in the cook's barely legible scrawl on a chalkboard fixed to the bulkhead. The next two hours were filled with any number of menial tasks in preparation for the onslaught to come. Wilson lit pilot lights, sharpened knives, chopped onions and a dozen other vegetables, beat eggs, gutted fish, shelled shrimp, deboned chicken, tenderized cuts of pork and beef with a leather mallet, and threw all the scraps out to sea for the sharks following in the vessel's wake.

At 7:00
A.M
. exactly, Nguyen appeared, wearing a spotless white double-breasted chef's jacket and improbably tall chef's hat, and the real work began on the
menu du jour
, usually Vietnamese in character: On a typical morning, they made spring rolls, lemon chicken, shrimp curry, barbecued spareribs, cinnamon beef, Saigon fish soup, scallion pancakes, boiled dumplings, twice-cooked pork—these just a sampling of the complicated dishes that could easily exhaust the entire repertoire of a good-sized Vietnamese restaurant back home. Ackerman had become addicted to the subtle cuisine of Indo-China while serving in the Quartermaster Corps during the War.

Wilson's job was more like battle than cooking. The little cook barked orders and darted around as if he were under artillery fire at Khe Sanh. The galley was a tight, airless corridor squeezed between the ready room and the forward hold. Stainless steel gas burners, a convection oven, and a refrigerator filled half the narrow space; small as he was, Nguyen managed to fill the other half with the force of his personality. He looked about thirty-eight but was probably closer to sixty, his skin brown and thick as an animal hide, after the manner of men who have spent too much time out of doors. A long,
ragged scar bisected his left eyebrow; the back of his right hand showed a faded tattoo of the Legion's five-pointed bomb insignia, surmounted by the regimental motto
Marche ou Crève
.

To the natural peevishness of the chef, Nguyen added the career soldier's love of discipline. He had learned his trade from the French in the days before Dien-Bien-Phu, had cooked for a Foreign Legion regimental mess, then for the American Army before Ackerman found him in a restaurant in Saigon. His chef's whites didn't seem to suit him. Wilson saw the man squatting in the jungle in camouflage and khaki, Sten gun slung over one shoulder.

Of course Wilson could do nothing right. He diced and deboned too slow, couldn't sauté an onion, didn't even know how to scrub pots properly.

“I think you raised by a family of stupids, joe!” Nguyen screamed at Wilson on his first day as cook's assistant. “How you get cook license? You listen too much Buffalo Springfield, I think! And Mr. Jimi Hendrix! I think you smoke Mary Jane before work and you hear rock and roll banging around your head when you supposed to concentrate on food! Purple Haze in your brain right now, yes?”

The cook had received the impression during the Vietnam War that Americans spent most of their time doing drugs and listening to loud music. Not only had these vices lost the U.S. a sure victory, Nguyen insisted, but they continued to foul up the lives of Americans everywhere.

“In States you all a bunch of drugged-out stupids wearing headphones,” the cook said. “It's amazing you can still take a piss without messing your pants!” Wilson tried to argue with him, but soon learned to keep his mouth shut. These theories, based on firsthand experience, circa 1967, were now set in stone. No amount of rational argument could break them down. Besides, there was just enough truth in what the cook said to dull Wilson's enthusiasm. He remembered all too well the bright eccentric kids in high school who blew their minds out on bong-hits and Thai stick, and ended up
dumb and impotent or dead or worse—sorting packages on the line for the postal service for the rest of their lives.

After cleanup, at about two every afternoon, Wilson went topside and assumed the role of ordinary seaman. His hours on deck beneath the spreading Mylar and the bright sky more than made up for the heated torment of the galley. The ocean was a great field of poppies whose colors changed with the changing light: ultramarine at three, iris blue at five, lavender at sunset, then black with the darkness that dropped down above the masts like velvet cloth over a parrot cage. There seemed no end to the water and sky, the horizon a pale demarcation at the farthest distance.

Wilson was speechless in the face of this severe beauty, dazzled by wind and sun and stars, by the immense, lovely emptiness of the waves. When on watch in the bow cage, his rapt attention to the simplicity of his new environment achieved something like the intensity of meditation, and it seemed that the old fearful, dread-haunted Wilson was emptying out at last, filling up with someone new. An untested person forming like a golem out of ocean air and the common mulch of experience and dreams.

Ten days passed like this. The
Compound Interest
cut like an arrow through the brightness, sails folding and unfolding in the wind, meal following meal in the cramped galley below. Wilson and Cricket rarely exchanged a single word. He had her promise that things would change after the Azores and didn't worry. She bunked in separate quarters, kept up a sisterly demeanor. But there wasn't much time to think about the situation—always something to do on board ship.

The good sailing held, the following winds and fast seas. Wilson slept the deep sleep of sailors that comes from weary limbs and sea air. The ocean lulled and unwound itself on all sides. Beneath the keel, the sand and shells of the continental shelf gave way to the dark, pure water, unimaginably deep.

On the eleventh day out, in the morning, the
Compound Interest
crossed the twenty-seventh parallel at forty degrees west and passed from high winds and bright skies into the morass of seaweed and current-borne garbage known as the Sargasso Sea. The vessel sat becalmed, in the long hours after ten o'clock, awaiting the slightest wind. The beach umbrella sails flexed, found nothing, and settled back again with a mechanical sigh.

“I've never known the dirty stuff to come this far north,” Captain Amundsen said. His charts showed good winds at this latitude, clear sailing. Wilson looked up from the brightwork, laid chamois and saddle soap aside for a few minutes, and came into the navigational octagon for a cigar. The captain did not like to smoke alone. The sea makes some men quiet, others garrulous; the captain was one of the latter.

“In my lifetime, I've seen the ocean's currents changing, the Sargasso getting nastier.” He poked his Cuban in Wilson's direction. “Used to be just weeds. Now it's full of junk. Petrochemical waste floating along in rusty fifty-gallon drums—you name it. Look at this shit. It's the ocean's toilet.”

Wilson shielded his eyes against the flat yellow sky. Gulls hung motionless above the masts. A powerful stench of dead fish filled his nostrils; clumps of tangled seaweed floated along like giant turds. The black water was foul with crumpled cans and plastic jugs, six-pack holders, and other bits of trash. A broken dining room chair floated by upright, its legs tangled in a clump of seaweed big as a traffic island.

“How does all this stuff get here?” Wilson said. “We're in the middle of the ocean.”

“I've seen a busted piano, even the burnt-out hulk of a Volkswagen floating on the weeds,” the captain said, studying the distance
for a gust of wind. “Once saw three sealed wooden coffins bobbing along like corks. The currents bring it in. Your garbage scows come out of the major cities and dump illegally, just beyond the twelve-mile limit. The stuff has to end up somewhere. Here it is.”

“Did you retrieve the coffins?” Wilson said, but didn't wait for a reply. A whiff of something indescribably foul from the port side tied a knot in his stomach. “Jesus, Captain, you've got two good engines ready to go. Can't we motor out of here?”

The captain shook his head. “Ackerman says no. He has some cockeyed notion about sailing round the world. And that means we sail; we don't use the engines except in emergencies.”

“What's this?” Wilson said.

“This is waiting,” the captain said, and went back to his charts.

Three more days passed in motionless torpor. The sun rose high and yellow through the haze, and the clouds burned off, and the becalmed
Compound Interest
roasted in the dead heat. A few limp clouds sagged in the blazing white sky.

Just aft of the foremast was an open-air gas grill, covered by an aluminum cap when not in use. On the evening of the third day, at the invitation of the owner, the ship's company assembled around this piece of hardware for an ocean barbecue. As the sun set over the Sargasso, Nguyen removed the cap, struck a match, and set ten sirloin steaks to sear in the yellow and blue gas fire. He brushed each steak carefully with marinade, turned the red meat into the flame with a professional flourish. Soon, the rancid air filled with the familiar backyard smell of grilling meat. This was a special occasion. The crew survived mostly on sea rations; real food was reserved for the billionaire.

Dwight Ackerman emerged blinking from the forward hatch, his nose in the air. The Sargasso, almost tolerable at this twilight hour, smelled like a big dog on a hot afternoon.

“Glad you folks could make it,” he called, then he stopped and blinked out at the endless expanse of muck and water, as if for a moment surprised to find himself at sea. He was a lean, timid fellow of about forty-five with a washed-out complexion and thick glasses that made his eyes big as the eyes of a bug in a cartoon. He wore a Lakers T-shirt and droopy Levi's rolled halfway up his white shins. The fading sun cast rose half-moon shadows through the glasses on his cheeks. Wilson was deeply disappointed. The man seemed relentlessly normal. He did not look like the mysterious devourer of fifteen-course meals, nor did he bear any resemblance to the famous shark of the financial pages, the corporate raider worth one and a quarter billion dollars.

“I sure am hungry,” Ackerman said, and settled with a sheepish grin to the left of Nguyen. He crossed his legs, showing smooth, womanish ankles protruding from a pair of squeaky-clean baby-blue Converse low-tops. “Make yourselves comfortable.” He gestured at the food. “Enjoy.”

In addition to the meat, there was a watercress-walnut salad and rice pilaf and eggplant moussaka and garlic bread and a bottle of decent Chilean red. Wilson had helped with the preparations in the usual sweat and hysteria of the galley. But now he forgot about his unpleasant labors and thought of the last steak dinner at Bazzano's. He tried to catch Cricket's attention across the grill. Her face was shadowed, turned to the darkness on the eastern horizon.

Ackerman ate four of the ten steaks and nearly half the side dishes. He ate methodically, turning the plate around and sweeping the food before him like the hands of a clock. Wilson, amazed, watched him eat. It was probably some kind of accelerated metabolism problem. The shit that must come out of the man! No conversation interrupted this serious business of eating; there was only the
scrape of silverware on china and the slop of seaweed against the hull. At last the billionaire belched and put his plate aside. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, blinked around at the assembled company, and raised his glass of wine in a toast.

“Well, crew! Let's say, to, uh … the Azores. How about that? Our next destination, right, Captain? If we ever get any wind, that is.”

Captain Amundsen nodded imperceptibly.

“And I would like to point out that we have two new crewpersons with us. Welcome aboard! Would you like to tell us something about yourselves? I always like to know a few things about my employees.” He turned to Cricket first.

Cricket put down her wine and looked up, her eyes blank and innocent. “Nothing to tell, sir,” she said. “I'm a professional sailor. Always have been.”

“Well, where are you from? Tell us that.”

She shrugged. “The sea more than anyplace else.”

“I see.” He frowned and turned to Wilson. “Are you a professional sailor too?”

“Actually, before this voyage I worked in brokerage houses in the city,” Wilson said. “Straight and Straight, the Tea Exchange—”

Ackerman's eyes widened behind his bug glasses. “You were a broker?” he said.