The Pirate's Daughter (24 page)

At last, the pirate held out his bottle of vodka. “Have a drink, citizen,” he said, but would not look in Wilson's direction.

“That's all anyone seems to do on this island,” Wilson said. He took a small sip from the bottle and handed it back.

“I hear you want to marry my daughter,” the pirate said, and he swung around suddenly and fixed Wilson with his one watery eye.

“Not exactly,” Wilson said.

“Good, because she's not mine to give away,” the pirate said. “I lost her to the Portugee years ago in a poker game. I suppose she didn't tell you that.”

“She did,” Wilson said. “And as far as I'm concerned, she doesn't belong to anyone but herself. She's got the right to do whatever she wants with her own life.”

The pirate gave a grin that showed a mouthful of yellow teeth. “Very funny,” he said. “Tell that joke to the Portugee. This isn't the States, kid. My daughter's not some average middle-class bimbo from Bumfuck, Illinois. There are no rights in Quatre Sables except property rights. Everybody belongs to somebody else.”

“That's not why I'm hesitating about this,” Wilson said.

“Huh?”

“First of all, you've got to admit, the circumstances are very weird. Second, even under normal conditions, I just don't think I'm ready for marriage right now.”

“You're kidding,” the pirate said.

“No,” Wilson said. “And there's more. To make a successful marriage, two people should have certain interests in common. They should at least share a similar temperament. Cricket's a fascinating, beautiful woman, but my tolerance for murder, slavery, and piracy is very low.”

“You're killing me, citizen!” The Pirate started to laugh, and he tipped his head back and his laughter came out in a long, drunken howl.

“One last thing,” Wilson said. “The in-laws.”

The pirate stopped laughing, and his eye narrowed.

“Unsavory,” Wilson said. “That's the best I can say. In truth, this whole business gives me the hives. I've never asked God for anything in my life, but when I saw those poor miserable Africans down there in chains, I asked Him to give me a chance for revenge on all of you.”

“Let me tell you something,” the pirate said in a calm voice. “You may not like slavery, but it's the wave of the future. They've got just one thing in Africa, and it's a thing they don't need—more people. There's just too fucking many of them, look at Bupanda now. Three million dead in the last ten years from starvation and butchery and civil war didn't even make a dent in their population problem. I've seen Bupu tribesmen with ten wives and seventy-three kids, living on garbage heaps. Did you know that Bupanda is the
most densely populated country in Africa? Every little nigger slut over there has an average of ten kids, we're talking average. The Western press never reported that, did they? I remember Rigala before the war; you had to crawl over your neighbor just to take a shit. The country was beautiful once, rolling hills, forests—reminded me of Ireland. Now, except for a few clicks of heavy jungle in the highlands, the forests are practically gone, the hills are covered with decomposing bodies. Two hundred years ago, Malthus said the only way to control population was through misery or vice. The Bupandans, they've got the misery part down pat. We're the vice part.

The pirate chuckled to himself and sloshed more vodka into his mouth. Wilson stared out the Lagonda's rain-wet window and considered what the pirate had said. The jungle slid by, a tangle of underbrush and moral complexity.

“I've seen a lot of terrible things these last few months,” Wilson said when he was ready to speak. “And I've decided that I'm going to live in the world as if it is a better place. Call this the romantic approach to life, a simple solution to a difficult problem. In any case it's the only way I can figure to keep my moral balance and my sanity. My gut tells me slavery is a great evil, and I'm going to live by what my gut tells me—that's another way of saying I'm going to live by my principles. But I'm afraid it may be too late for Cricket. She's been wallowing in your mire for most of her life. She desperately wants to come clean, but it may be too late to get the dirt off.”

The pirate sat up and capped the bottle of vodka and shoved it back into the pocket of his rumpled brown suit.

“I could cut your throat right now,” he growled. “Cut you ear to fucking ear and drop your body in the jungle for your guts to be eaten out by animals.” Then he rapped a sharp knuckle on the partition, and the glass slid down and Schlüber turned around.

“What is it, Captain?” the German said.

“Show this little bastard your knife.”

The German grinned and reached into his coat and pulled out a bone-handled knife, its long blade curved like a sardonic smile.

“I wouldn't,” Wilson said. “The Portugee is a friend of mine.”

“Bullshit,” the pirate said, and made a throat-cutting gesture. “Cut him, Schlüber.”

“What about the car, Captain?” Schlüber's grin faded. “What would the Portugee say if we got blood all over his Wilton carpets?”

“You heard me,” the pirate said. “Cut him!”

Wilson tried to stay calm. Sweat broke out on his forehead. He looked from the pirate to Schlüber and leaned back slowly into the door. The jungle was only a few yards away. But the German's face went white, and he turned without another word and put the screen back up. Wilson let out an inaudible sigh of relief.

“Look at this, you bastard,” the pirate said to Wilson.

Wilson looked down.

The pirate held out a knobby hand, and Wilson saw it was trembling with rage.

“That's how close you came,” the pirate said. “If I had real men working for me instead of goddamned M.B.A.'s, you would already be dead. Now keep your fucking mouth shut.”

Wilson turned again to the window. Out in the rain in the jungle underbrush, he saw a statue of the virgin huntress Diana, a headless deer at her feet, on a pedestal of marble taken by creepers. Her bow hand was gone, and with it half her arm; the other hand plucked at raindrops. Moss grew in the empty marble sockets of her eyes.

Sheep grazed placidly on grass at the bottom of the disused moat. A great wrought-iron gate perhaps thirty feet high led into a cobbled courtyard where a fountain modeled after the Trevi in
Rome splashed quiet water into a basin full of lily pads. The Lagonda pulled into the courtyard and stopped before the main entrance of the house, a baroque portico alive with saints and angels and arabesques carved in a pinkish stone that looked softer than sand.

“I hope you come back in chunks, you insufferable little fuck,” the pirate said as Wilson stepped out of the dark interior.

“We'll see about that,” Wilson said, and was going to say more, but the pirate slammed the door, and the Lagonda lurched over the cobbles and out the mouth of the wrought-iron gate.

Wilson stood in the rain looking up at the house till the shoulders of his jacket were soaked through. He found a handkerchief in his pocket and blew his nose. A second later, the front door opened. A diminutive woman wearing a housedress and flowered apron peered out and said something in a rapid language he did not understand.

Wilson shook his head. “English,” he said. “A little French.”

“You get wet,” the woman said. “Come inside.”

Wilson went up the wide marble steps and, after wiping his feet carefully on a mat that read “Bienvenudo,” stepped inside. The Villa Real had been extensively remodeled sometime during the last hundred years. The walls were covered with dark Victorian wainscoting and hung with paintings in ornate gilt frames of the same era. Wilson noticed an uncatalogued Madonna by Murillo and two Goya bullfighting canvases he had never seen before.

The woman showed him to the library, a vast room with Gothic arched ceilings and bookshelves two stories high. Diamond-pane windows overlooked the formal gardens. The Portugee was on a ladder selecting a book when Wilson entered. Wilson remembered the man immediately. Don Luis Hidalgo de la Vaca looked the same as he had the night of the cockfight, except he had traded his white linen suit for a red silk smoking jacket and quilted Moroccan slippers of yellow suede. His chauffeur, the Killa from Manila, sat quietly in a Tudor armchair by the window reading a biography of Bismarck. He closed the book and followed Wilson's progress across the room with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Patron,”
the wrestler called.

Don Luis gave a quick look over his shoulder. “Do you know the poet Byron, Mr. Lander?” he said.

“Not personally,” Wilson said. “I read him in college.”

Don Luis pulled a heavy volume off the shelf and descended carefully, one rung at a time. “Byron was such a passionate writer, don't you think?”

“That's what they say,” Wilson said. “Supposedly he slept with every man, woman, and child in Europe below the age of fifty.”

Don Luis frowned. “That's not what I mean,” he said. “I'm talking about the poems.” He crossed to a library table strewn with books, pulled up a wing-backed easy chair, and sat down, volume of Byron in his lap like a cat.

Wilson shrugged. “
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
was dull,” he said. “They made us read it in college.
Don Juan
was a little better. I prefer Keats.”

“Keats was sentimental and weak,” Don Luis said. “Think of all those whining letters to Fanny Brown,” then he pointed to a stool at his feet. “Sit down.”

Wilson shook his head. “I'll stand,” he said.

Don Luis fingered his small mustache and looked up at Wilson through weary eyes. It was impossible to know what was going on behind that aristocratic poker face. Not knowing made Wilson uneasy.

“Say what you will about Byron.” Don Luis tapped the volume with his thin, elegant fingers. “But his life lived up to his poems. He was heroic, a man of action in the best sense. An aristocrat. His poetry reflects his life, and so it's better suited to our times than the paler work of more contemplative poets.”

Wilson made an ambivalent gesture that Don Luis interpreted as skepticism. He sat forward in the chair, eyes bright at the prospect of an argument.

“Look around, Mr. Lander, we are entering a new era in the history of the world,” he said, assuming a lecturing tone. “Men
have grown tired of the rule of law. The seas are alive again with pirates. At last we are leaving behind the petty, the bourgeois, the comfortable. Leaving the age of corporate man and entering an age of wolves. Physical heroism and brute force will become the virtues of the future. Personal honor, and I mean the honor of the warrior, will replace all the lies of international commercial culture. Look at your own country! The dominant classes are morally bankrupt, too self-absorbed even to reproduce themselves. They value luxury more than power, safety more than their own souls. What have they wrought in the absence of honor? Suburbia! A place without texture in which all originalities of character are suppressed by tranquilizing drugs, where blandness is deemed the greatest good, where a man's highest aspiration is to become a lawyer or a marketing consultant. You Americans have become a soft nasty people, a people who want neither terror nor virtue. Thank God all that is changing now. Your decaying cities are breeding a new race of assassins whose hands will never tire of reaching for the sword. One day soon they will rise up and slit your throats while you sleep. Well then …”

“Wait a minute, Luis,” Wilson interrupted. “Forget the philosophizing and the Romantic poets. You intend to kill me, right?” and he slumped down on the stool, exhausted suddenly, and put his elbows on the table. “How are you going to do it?”

“I'll probably have Alfonso snap your neck,” Don Luis said after a moment's consideration. “It's really the quickest way, with the least fuss and mess. Relax and it's over in seconds.”

Wilson shot a glance at the massive wrestler, once again engrossed in his biography of Bismarck, and already felt the man's meaty fingers crushing his windpipe. Wilson went dizzy suddenly and leaned his forehead against the library table. For a whole minute, he stared down at the worn marble of the floor, at the Portugee's quilted yellow slippers. When he lifted his head back up again, Don Luis was waiting, fingertips pressed together.

“Before you kill me,” Wilson said in a voice as calm as he could make it, “let me tell you a story about my father.”

Don Luis smiled patiently. He had all the time in the world.

“During World War Two, my father served with the U.S. Army Air Corps stationed out of Lancaster Field in England,” Wilson said. “They ran bombing runs to France and Germany in those big planes, you know, B-17's, the Flying Fortresses. My father was the radio operator, but many of the missions he flew went out under radio silence, so most of the time he just sat there in the belly of the plane, waiting for the flak to rip open the fuselage. They went up four and five times a week, the odds were terrible, something like ninety percent of the airmen were hit. In the last six months of 1943 the Allies lost more than ten thousand men in the sky over Europe. The more you went up, the worse your odds of surviving. But if you survived twenty-five missions, they would rotate you out. That was the magic number.

“My father survived his twenty-five missions without a scratch, but he didn't want to be rotated out. Instead he asked for a transfer to a new plane for twenty-five more missions. They never had enough experienced men on hand, so he got the twenty-five missions he asked for, and the next twenty-five. He ended up flying more missions than any other radio operator in the Army Air Corps during World War Two. Everybody thought he was crazy. He wasn't crazy; he was a gambler who knew he was better than the odds.

“Before the war he had been a law student at Ashland College, someone who had never gambled in his whole life, never touched a pack of cards. He became a gambler after his very first mission in the air over Europe. It was a famous air disaster; it's in the history books. A whole squadron went up without support to bomb a munitions factory and ran into a nest of German fighters. Out of fifty-seven planes, only one came back—his. Wasn't even touched, not a single bullet hole. After that they changed the plane's name from something stupid and patriotic, like the
Winged Victory
, to the
Lucky Linda
and painted a big happy naked girl on the side. Father figured he had already cheated the worst odds of all on his very first mission, so why couldn't he do it again and again? He loved cheating
the odds. He told me once that cheating the odds was the only thing that makes us human beings. There was no real skill, no art involved, he said—it was all style.