The Pirate's Daughter (15 page)

Fluorescent tubes glared down with a green and poisonous light. The unpaneled bulkhead lay bare of decor, except for an Italian pinup calendar that nobody had bothered to change since July. The ready room was a stuffy, narrow closet furnished with a chipped Formica-topped table and a padded bench covered in green baize fabric.

Wilson was confined to this green purgatory as the storm lashed the ship, with nothing to do but ride it out. He took a book from his duffel bag, strapped himself into the bench, and began to read: It was Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, the tattered single-volume edition from the used-book stall in the Bend. His eyes grew weary of the small text after a while, but that didn't matter; the weeks of relentless motion had left him thirsty for the nonphysical, for the study and contemplation of his former, half-dreaming life.

Beyond the thick polymer ribbing of the hull, the waves came down like mountains. At times the ship was inundated, completely underwater, its bow descending into the colorless valleys of the
troughs. Meanwhile, Wilson's head was full of emperors, assassinations, aqueducts, barbarians, roads that led to Rome, cruel twists of fate, the deeds of centurions, courtesans, and slaves, an endless procession of the great and the mediocre, the depraved and the forgotten. For twenty-two hundred pages and mile after mile of heavy seas, the famous city held out against the chaos of history till there was nothing palpable left of Rome at all, nothing except a few broken ruins and its essential component, the idea of order.

Wilson looked up from his reading fourteen hours later. He had barely moved from his place in the ready room. Sometime during that interval Nguyen had taken a seat at the other end of the table. The Vietnamese cook seemed to possess an equilibrium all his own. Without benefit of safety harness, he sat upright on the bench, playing solitaire and smoking unfiltered Gauloises bleus from a crumpled pack, ash dropping a good inch off the end of his cigarette. As the vessel rolled, Nguyen swayed in that direction, like a gyroscope on a string. He laid the cards in meticulous rows; through some miracle of static electricity they stayed exactly where he put them.

“So, how're you doing?” Wilson said when he was able to focus on something other than print. He saw squiggles at the corner of his eyes from lack of sleep. “Got all the pots and pans battened down?” It was a stupid question, but he didn't know what else to say. They had never exchanged a single word of conversation outside the galley.

The cook barely raised an eyebrow.

“You beating the odds there?” Wilson gave it his best smile.

“No talk,” Nguyen said. He wouldn't look up from the game.

“Why not?”

The cook sighed and folded the cards into the bottom of the deck and began to deal himself again. “All you joes,” he said. “The big, stupid joe who is captain, the joe who eats like a pig, and you, the joe who reads too much. After the
français
leave Cochin China, I see many American joes come to my country, joes like flies on shit. The
joes come and bring helicopters and drop poison powder on the trees, and everybody dies. When joe comes to your house saying, ‘I want to be your friend,' good advice run very fast in opposite direction.”

“What does that mean?” Wilson said.

“That mean I do not want to talk,” Nguyen said.

“Why not have a conversation?” Wilson persisted. He was restless and a little dazed after so many hours of breathing the dust of history. “Here we are, stuck on a boat in the middle of a storm in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do except talk, and you won't say a word.”

The Vietnamese cook turned his face into the fluorescent glare. Thoughts registered behind his eyes like dark birds coming home to roost. “Listen up, joe,” he said. “I do not wish to make any friends with you. Because on this boat, who knows what happens and because later on I do not wish to be sorry for you.”

Wilson tried to get Nguyen to explain himself, but the man would not say another word.

The storm lessened a bit the next afternoon. Wilson unbolted the deck hatch and went up into the navigational octagon. From this vantage the onslaught of weather was thrilling and terrifying. It seemed to him another world boiled out there in ferment, a landscape unseen since the beginning of time, when—so the story goes—God raised the seas in their fury upon the lifeless rock of the earth.

Captain Amundsen and Cricket were perched over charts and instruments beneath the bubble, like turret gunners in a Flying Fortress.
Waves pounded across the Plexiglas, reducing the illumination in the octagon to a dull, watery twilight.

“State your business, mister,” the captain said as Wilson rebolted the hatch.

“Permission to remain topside, sir,” Wilson said. “Going a little stir-crazy down there.”

The captain nodded. “Take a look at this.”

Wilson stepped over to the opalescent radar screen. The storm appeared as a writhing, ugly green stain the size of a continent, superimposed on the Atlantic's familiar contours.

“According to our satellite fix, we've been knocked off course by about four hundred nautical miles,” the captain said, squinting down at the screen. “We're at two and a half degrees east of the twenty-second parallel, thirty-two degrees south of Greenwich. Making south-southeast for the Mauritanian coast of Africa at an approximate speed of seventeen knots.”

“How much time to get back to where we're supposed to be?”

The captain squinted out at the murky turmoil beyond the bubble. “Never can tell. A few days, a week, two. The sea's a mighty queer place. Anything can happen. I've seen tidal waves swallow whole cities and black skies at noon and volcanoes rising out of the dark water all bubbling and spitting up chunks of hot earth like blood, and I've seen worse yet.” The captain paused as a quick riff of static came over the shortwave. Wilson could almost make out the rise and fall of human speech before it faded out altogether.

“Once did two years as skipper of an English oceanographic vessel; this is twenty-odd years ago,” the captain continued, and a distant haunted look came to his eye. “She was the HMS
Ozymandias
, an old Royal Navy cutter refurbished for scientific work that some joker had renamed the
Sandra Dee
, after that blond girl who was in all those American beach movies.”

“Sandra Dee played Gidget,” Wilson interrupted, “the original Gidget before the TV show,” but at a sharp glance from Cricket, he felt foolish and shut up.

“The Brits outfitted the ship with all the latest technology.” The captain flicked a hard fingernail against the sonar screen. “Computers, sonar, radar, and a robot sub built by British Leyland and equipped with video cameras and attached by a two-mile-long umbilical cord. We were doing research on squids. Damned elusive creatures, the giant ones, I mean. But there's been stories about them for centuries—how they can rise from the ocean floor and seize ships in their huge tentacles, how they've been known to do battle with whales. All apocryphal, of course, and ridiculed by marine biologists until some fisherman off the Douglas Reef in the South Pacific pulled up a sizable hunk of squid cartilage in the nets that fixed the whole creature at four hundred and sixty feet long. So everyone got excited, and we sailed out of Bristol in January to take a look down south.

“It was pretty rough going for a while, bad weather and engine trouble, and we ended up spending a month or so in the anchorage at Rorotan till the weather cleared. Then we were out after them. For a while we found nothing remarkable, no squids bigger than the kind they fry up with garlic in Italian restaurants. But one night, I was on watch around midnight and the sonar went crazy, a whole pattern of blips about two fathoms off our port bow. I woke up one of the marine biologists, a Frenchwoman named Adrienne something, and we unleashed the robot, and it went down with its spotlights and video cameras into the blackness. After a few minutes it started sending back pictures. We couldn't believe what we saw: a squid the size of a tractor trailer, its one monster eye about as big around as the aboveground swimming pools you see in humbler suburban neighborhoods in the States.

“The French biologist went white and started to shake. It wasn't the squid so much as what the squid had its tentacles around, a massive unknown thing like a gigantic worm, thrashing in the black water, its long, tubular body disappearing into the depths of the sea. This looked to be some kind of fight—squids are like cats, you know, very territorial—but the squid, huge as it was, didn't have a
chance. The other creature was the largest living thing I have ever seen, and I have seen blue whales in the waters off Newfoundland long as two football fields.

“We watched astonished, afraid to breathe. The bit of the creature's flank we could make out was covered with a thick mess of barnacles and plant life, as if it had been resting somewhere on the bottom for centuries. Then the squid let out a massive cloud of black ink, and when the cloud cleared, there was nothing. Just empty water. We could only assume that the unknown thing, giant squid stuck to its back, had sunk forever into the depths.”

“Wow,” Wilson said, impressed. “What was it?”

The captain took a cigar out of his pocket and put it between his teeth unlit. “The Kraken,” he said quietly.

“The what?” Wilson said.

“The primeval worm that lives at the bottom of the sea. When it finally rises to the surface, they say the world will come to an end. And God knows, we've seen enough signs of that lately.”

“You're kidding,” Wilson said.

At that moment Cricket turned from the navigational computer with a sarcastic grin on her face. “Of course he's kidding,” she said. “It's a fish story, the best damn fish story I've ever heard.”

Wilson looked from Cricket to the captain, not sure what to believe.

“One thing you need to learn about sailors, Wilson,” Cricket said, “is they always tell tall tales. Makes the time pass.”

“Captain?” Wilson said.

The captain scratched his shaggy beard and shrugged. “You don't have to believe me,” he said, “either of you. But I'm here to tell you now there are more things in the sea and on it than you've ever thought possible. Just look around …”

He gestured vaguely toward the ocean's bleak expanse, the horizon black with storm, the waves tall as three-story buildings—then he fixed Wilson with a look of unknown significance.

They unbolted the Plexiglas bubble and replaced the foul-weather cowling. The turbo-diesels were switched off. The beach umbrella sails caught a gentle following wind and spread benevolently above the drying deck. The storm had blown itself out in the small hours of the night.

For the first time in six days the airtight hatches were opened and the ship's company emerged dazzled into the sunlight of early afternoon. They strolled the deck like tourists, staring out at the flat blue sea and harmless white clouds on the horizon. The designers had done their job well; a security cable snapped off the forward mast was the only damage to the
Compound Interest
from the worst Atlantic storm since 1935.

The captain managed to get the BBC over the shortwave.

“Reports say the west coast of Africa was hit pretty damn hard,” he repeated to Wilson. “From Morocco to the Cameroons. Between fifteen and twenty vessels lost, including a container ship from one of the Scandinavian lines. Three fishing villages in Gambia were washed out to sea. Electrical power went off in the nation of Guinea-Bissau, and in Liberia they were obliged to stop the civil war for a few days. All in all, it looks like casualties might add up to something around five thousand human beings. And we came through the worst of it unscathed. I take back everything I ever said about this tub.”

It was one of the unremarkable natural disasters that each year cull millions of lives from the world's multitudes each year, worth no more than a couple of minutes on the evening news in the States. Wilson knew he should be thankful for surviving the watery holocaust. Instead, he was angry and a little nauseated by the utter randomness of the thing. In a world where a gust of wind could blow away thousands, was there sense in taking another breath?
Human beings were no better than ants, Wilson thought, but at least ants could go about their business without the curse of intellect. Then he changed his mind. No, human beings were not like ants; they resembled a different sort of insect altogether. They were like bees in a glass hive, busy at work making honey, full of energy and plans. All it took was one stone.

Porpoises ran alongside the ship. Rising to the surface, they made a gentle blowing sound as they filled their lungs with air, a light splash as they sank again into the murk. A smell like cinnamon and earth and rotting fruit drifted in on the easterlies. The captain had gone below and left Wilson at the helm for the second watch of the night. But Wilson didn't need the man to tell him what that rich smell meant: Africa was near.

After an hour of wind and porpoises, Wilson felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Cricket, her face indistinct in the sea darkness, her copper hair a black tangle. Her voice, when it came, had a hollow, faraway sound.

“I need to see you tonight,” Cricket said.

“O.K.,” Wilson said.

“After the third watch. And be careful.”

When the captain returned topside, Wilson went below and lay in his berth till his illuminated digital watch read 3:17
A.M
., then he crept forward and opened the hatch to the utility closet. Cricket waited, suspended in her hammock like a spider. A little starlight reflected from the sea through the porthole. He could barely make out her pale face, her lips like a black wound. Wilson stepped inside and closed the hatch carefully.

“What's going on?” Wilson said in a whisper. “I think you should tell me now.”