The Pirate's Daughter (20 page)

Wilson sat on a splintered crate and watched the crowds go by. He tried to concentrate and was taken with the grim realization that he would most likely never find his way home from this godforsaken place. Then nausea passed over him in a wave, and he closed his eyes and fought it down. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a column of about a hundred African men and women coming along the quay in a peculiar shuffling manner. As they drew closer, he heard the rattle and clink of metal and saw that they were shackled each to each; steel chains led from steel collars to manacles around their wrists and ankles. Guards armed with machine guns and cattle prods herded the column along toward a large cinder-block hangar at the far perimeter. Over the next half hour, ten such columns passed. On the faces of the captives Wilson saw the same despair, the same hunted look, and it did not take long for him to realize the truth: These human beings were caught in the claws of an ancient evil.

When Cricket returned after an hour, Wilson rose off the crate and stood unsteadily before her. The .38 fell out of his jeans and clattered across the pavement.

“Hey!” Cricket said. “Be careful with that. You could shoot somebody in the foot.” But when she caught sight of his eyes, she crossed her arms and looked away. The silver pistol glinted on the stained cement between them.

“Slaves,” Wilson said, his voice a bare croak.

“I thought you knew,” Cricket said, and she would not meet his eyes.

“Where do they come from?” Wilson said.

“Africa.” Cricket shrugged. “Bupanda mostly.”

“Where are they taking them?”

“For now, the barracoon over there.” She pointed out the concrete hangars. “It's where they hold the auctions.”

“My God,” Wilson said, and a shiver ran up his back.

“It's the way things are here,” Cricket said gently. When she looked back at him, her eyes were lost in shadow. “I don't like it either, but there's nothing I can do right now. You can't make good money from piracy alone. It's too hard these days, too many risks involved. We only do the occasional special job, like the one we just pulled on Ackerman's boat—well planned in advance, with an inside man, the works. Mostly it's slaving raids to the Bupandan coast, then back here to the barracoon, where we unload the merchandise for sale.”

Now the sky bloomed black as dried blood against the dim bulk of the hill.

“How do you sleep at night?” Wilson managed.

“I don't. That's why I need you,” Cricket said, and she put her hard hands on the back of his neck and kissed him. “There's a way out of this life. I want you to show me the way.”

Wilson let himself be led up the quay and through a gap in the barbed-wire fence to a waiting car. It was a battered Volkswagen Thing, bumpers and windshield missing, still painted the original
purple, with the factory flower power decal kit popular in the late sixties. Mustapha sat in the passenger seat, shotgun on his lap, scars written across his skin like a threatening message. He watched with wary yellow eyes as Wilson climbed into the backseat.

“Hi,” Wilson said for no reason at all.

The man tapped the butt of his shotgun with two fingers. “Next time,” he said under his breath.

Cricket came around and got into the driver's seat and put the Thing in gear, and they lurched over a rutted path and after a while turned left up a wider road that ascended the slope. The trash dwellings loomed in a primitive darkness unrelieved by electric lights. Wilson thought of the crazy cubist city in
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
, and his head hurt with the thought. Unfamiliar constellations wheeled above. Starved faces passed before the wavering headlights, the faces of people of whom it could rightly be said were poor as dirt. Big-headed, ribby children lay in the mud around fires of scrap wood and dung. Shallow ditches were piled high with offal and the picked-over carcasses of dead animals. The stench was unbearable.

“They float across the straits in rafts made from old tires and oil drums,” Cricket said over the sputter of the engine. “We cull the strongest for sale in the barracoon, but even so, they keep on coming. Even this squalor is better for them than the massacres still going on in Bupanda.”

Wilson felt hot and cold at the same time, and the pain in his knees became so intense he stopped breathing for a few seconds. Cricket's words faded in and out like a bad radio station. When he sank unconscious against the torn backseat, it was as if he were drowning in a sea of dirty water the color of human misery.

The monkey tittered like a bird on the windowsill, just the other side of the mosquito netting. About the size of a squirrel, with silky orange fur, a black tail, and a black tuft sticking straight up from its head like a Mohawk, it ate a mango in quick, nervous bites, turning the green fruit over between its paws as Wilson had seen humans turning an ear of buttered corn. He watched in silence for as long as he could; then he couldn't stand the pain any longer and let out a short gasp. The monkey dropped the fruit, its face twisted up in surprise for half a second; then it began to howl. The sound was ear-shattering, loud, spiraling whoops like a siren, a sound ten times as big as the creature itself.

“Goddamned howler monkeys!” Wilson heard a man's voice from the next room. He tried to turn toward the voice, but he could not move because of the pain in his joints. When he looked back at the windowsill, the monkey was gone.

A few minutes later a tall, stoop-shouldered man in a dingy white doctor's coat entered the room. He was about forty, with a long red European face, scraggly brown hair that hung lank over his forehead and a nose with pores wide enough to drive a truck through. When the man sat beside the bed, Wilson caught the strong stench of alcohol. He put a limp hand on Wilson's forehead, examined Wilson's eyes, thumped on his chest.

“Are you a doctor?” Wilson said, and was surprised that his voice sounded so weak and uncertain.

“Evidently,” the doctor said, alcohol wafting out with the word.

“You're drunk,” Wilson said.

The doctor shrugged. “Not drunk, exactly. Just a little—you know,” he wagged his hand back and forth. “It's the only way to bear life in this pirate hell.”

“What am I doing here?” Wilson said, but his voice was already
growing faint, and when he spoke, his knees hurt. The doctor put a hand on Wilson's arm, a gesture that was neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Rest now.” Then he took a needle out of somewhere and gave Wilson an injection in his thigh and went away.

After that, Wilson fell into a drugged sleep in which he dreamed he was chained to a palm tree on a beach made of different-colored sand, all twisted up like chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream. In the dream, a man who resembled the doctor came along carrying a large scalpel in one hand and a strange animal in a wooden cage in the other. The animal was a sort of cross between a monkey and a wolf, with webbed claws and a mane of coppery hair and large, wet, innocent eyes. It was the eyes that made the animal dangerous. The doctor cut a square hole in Wilson's stomach with the scalpel, took the animal out of the cage, put it in the hole, and sewed the hole back up. Wilson waited a minute or so, then he felt the animal scratching, and he felt the small, pointed teeth, and he knew the thing wouldn't take long to eat its way out again.

In the morning, the sun shone saffron yellow through the big windows. Wilson lay on a square white bed under a canopy of mosquito netting in a room that gave out onto a tile patio with a view of the shanty city below. Rattan shades rattled at the window in a hot breeze. The walls of the room were painted terra-cotta red except for a creamy border around the ceiling, and there was an antique dresser and a large vanity and a table of inlaid wood upon which rested a bowl of pomegranates. Next to the door hung a very good reproduction of a nineteenth-century French painting, Léon
Gérôme's
Le Bain aux Harem
, which depicts an African slave girl bathing a white concubine in a blue-tiled pool. The room had a feminine feel that Wilson found pleasant and familiar. He lay in the sunlight and stretched and realized that his joints did not ache so much this morning.

When the light changed a little, a large black woman came through the door with a tray of spicy soup, bread, and sharp-tasting milk that probably came from a goat. Awhile later, the doctor called, still smelling of alcohol. He examined Wilson's eyes, took his pulse, and listened to his lungs again.

“You're eating today,” the doctor said, a vein in his nose pulsing gently. “Good. And you look much better.”

“Thanks,” Wilson said. “What's wrong with me?”

“If we're going to have a little talk, do you mind if I make myself a drink?” the doctor said. Before Wilson could speak, the doctor was gone. He returned a few minutes later with a glass full of pink gin and ice.

“I'd offer you one,” he said, “but in your condition …” Then he took a long, greedy drink of the gin and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “That's why I like working up here on the ridge,” he said. “Great booze. Hard to get the good stuff down there.”

“O.K., Doctor,” Wilson said.

The doctor nodded, finished off the glass, and set it on the inlaid table. “You are recovering from a case of dengue fever, of a particularly virulent type common to equatorial regions of Africa. The natives call it
ka-dinge pwepe
, literally the stiff knees, because the fever attacks your knees, and for a while afterward you walk around like a mechanical man. This type of dengue—which I call Dengue Boursaly, after myself—seems to be unique to this miserable island, in that unlike continental types of the disease, which is caused by bacteria, this type appears to be viral. And it can act on the nervous system in the latter stages if not checked with the proper combination of diuretics and antibiotics, which is also very unusual. I would
write a paper for the medical journals on the subject but”—the doctor gave a Gallic shrug—“I am a prisoner here, and they do not allow me to publish.”

Wilson focused on the ceiling, taking this in. “How long have I been out?” he said at last.

“About three and a half weeks,” Dr. Boursaly said. “You were absolutely raving when they first brought you up. Now you're as good as on your feet again, thank God. Otherwise, it would have meant my head.”

Wilson started to smile; then he realized the doctor wasn't kidding.

“Not really …” Wilson said.

Dr. Boursaly picked up the empty glass, stared at the melting ice cubes for a second, and put it down again with a sigh. “Your Mistress Page was very clear about the matter. She went off on a raid with her father—last chance before the rainy season, you know—and she left you in my care. If you are not well by the time she returns, she told me, ouf”—he drew his hand across his neck—“it's my head on a stick. And that's no bloody joke. Old Dr. Raimee misdiagnosed a malignant tumor; you know what they did to him?”

“No,” Wilson said.

“They buried the poor bastard up to his neck, covered his face with honey, and dumped out a jar of red ants.”

“Ouch,” Wilson said.

“He lived, but he never looked the same. So don't worry, I'll be stopping by every day just to make sure you don't step on a splinter or wet the bed and catch cold.”

When the doctor was gone, Wilson lay gazing up at the ceiling, his mind unpleasantly jumbled. A large flat cockroach scuttled across it upside down, hit a sweaty patch, and fell with a solid thunk to the vanity, where it waved its legs in the air for a moment before it went still. After a while, Wilson dozed off and dreamed that the orange
monkey came back and stared at him from the other side of the mosquito netting, its silky orange fur stirring slightly in a breeze from the sea.

The house was built against the slope on two levels, with plaster walls painted in earthy red or mustard pastel and low ceilings that reminded Wilson of the hold of a ship. On the upper floor, a living room furnished with eighteenth-century antiques, a bathroom with a skylight and sunken marble tub that looked big enough for two people, and a walk-in closet full of Cricket's clothes. The bedroom and kitchen and dining room occupied the lower floor, open to the tile patio, which was sheltered by a green-and-white-striped awning and set with wrought-iron deck furniture. A low wall topped with terra-cotta urns full of huge tropical flowers framed the bay, blue and brown and green in the near distance.

Lying beneath the awning, stiff-kneed in one of the patio chairs, Wilson was shielded from view of the heaving shanty city below. He could only see the flowers and the water, and when the wind blew from the Atlantic, he could not smell the horrible stench of the place. Then, for a few moments, it was possible to believe some picturesque hamlet of the French Riviera lay down there, not an ugly warren of hovels and misery on an obscure island off the coast of Africa. Except for the black woman who came twice a day to cook, Wilson was alone in the house, and he looked forward to Dr. Boursaly's daily visits. The doctor usually stopped by in the morning, an hour or two before the heat of noon, and joined Wilson with a drink on the patio.

Today Dr. Boursaly drank three pink gins in quick succession and was very drunk by 11:00
A.M
. He reeled around the patio, bumping
into the wrought-iron furniture, and almost knocked one of the terra-cotta urns off the wall onto the tiles. Wilson began to grow alarmed. The doctor waved his fourth drink toward the town, ice and gin sloshing out of the glass for emphasis.

“From this distance you might find that panorama quite romantic,” he said.

“Actually no,” Wilson said.

“Poverty is always romantic from a distance,” the doctor said, ignoring him. “Next time you're down in the middle of that
merde
, take a microscope and watch where you step, because it's a filthy swamp full of bacteria, full of the nastiness Africa is famous for. Africa, Mother of diseases, my friend! In my six years of captivity here I have seen them all—elephantitis, hepatitis, dysentery, malaria, meningitis, scarlet fever, yellow fever, typhus, beri-beri, cafard, scurvy, tuberculosis, cholera, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, ten different mutations of AIDS, dengue, even Ebola and Blarh's syndrome, not to mention flus, ordinary fevers, rickets, and madness—all increasingly immune to commonly prescribed anything. A virologists' paradise, you might say. Well, I'm not a virologist, I'm a cardiologist.”