The Pirate's Daughter (26 page)

Wilson waited alone and slightly bewildered at the center of the topiary maze of English boxwood in the Portugee's garden. He had been led blindfolded to this spot—a perfect green oval of grass completely surrounded by high hedge. A red velvet canopy billowed and snapped over his head like a sail in the warm breeze. A broom tied with a black bow lay at his feet. Off to the side in two fragile reed cages, yellow African swallows twittered pleasantly in the sun. It was all part of a tradition he didn't quite understand. From over the hedge came the sound of laughter and voices and the light metallic harmonies of a Bupandan Tinka band. His borrowed suit of white linen pinched in the crotch and sagged under the arms. He waited fifteen minutes more and began to sweat. Then, at a light rustling of leaves, he turned to see Cricket emerge from the green wall, eyes down, shy as a virgin. He held his breath. She was barefoot; her toes made little indentations in the springy grass.

Her dress was cut out of a bolt of iridescent Javanese silk once intended for the wives of the Marahaja of Puj, taken from a merchantman captured off the Malabar Coast—a fantastic fabric whose absolute whiteness was not white at all, rather a silken blue static, like the color of light reflected on water. Several layers of the stuff arranged in petticoats made up the flowing skirt; a short vest left her midriff and arms bare. A black pearl on a silver hoop pierced her navel. She wore her hair caught up in a net of silver thread studded with seed pearls, and carried a bouquet of African coral lilies.

Wilson couldn't keep a stunned smile from his face, though as always uncertainty and dread gnawed at his heart around the edges, and he knew the world beyond this moment of silk and green grass
and blue sky was full of grief and violence which had them both caught like something helpless in a spider web.

“O.K., how do we do this?” he said when Cricket stepped up to the other side of the broom. She hid her face in the lilies and didn't answer. Wilson's ears felt hot, his palms sweaty, and the back of his neck prickled, though for a moment he couldn't say why. It seemed ridiculous to think of himself as a groom. The canopy billowed with a sharp snapping sound.

“So where's the witnesses, the priest?” Wilson said. His voice came out thin and nervous.

Cricket looked up, her eyes jade green. “It's just us and whatever we believe in,” she said.

“What do you believe in?” Wilson said.

Cricket shrugged. “Right now, you,” she said.

“Is that enough?”

“I wish my mother were here. That would have been nice.”

“Where is she?”

“Dead, remember? Like yours.”

“Oh …”

Cricket lowered her flowers and took a deep breath. “Ready?” she said, but she waited another second before she came around the broom and took Wilson by the arm. “O.K., it's simple enough. We step over together, at the same time.”

“Wait,” Wilson said. He shook his head and put a hand on her cheek. “You look beautiful right now.”

“Just like any other bride.” Cricket smiled, and she leaned up and kissed him, and as she kissed him, almost without knowing it, they stepped over the broom.

Wilson didn't feel any different when they were on the other side. He thought for a moment of the Catholic icons that had hung in his great-aunt's house—Jesus of the Bleeding Heart, the Madonna poised on a silver cloud surrounded by cherubim—and he remembered the high mass wedding of a friend in college, the incense and chanting and readings from the Gospel, how it was all meant to
invoke the presence of God, the celebration of a sacrament. And for a moment, on the other side of the broom, Cricket on his arm, he felt lost.

“I know,” Cricket's voice in his ear sounded far away. “Seems like there should be more to it.”

“Maybe,” Wilson said.

“That's why I got the birds. My own little touch.”

She took his hand and led him over to the reed cages full of birds. From each of them came a slightly different sweet-shrill note.

“These are the males, and these are the females,” she said. “The only way to tell is by the sound they make. The higher-pitched ones are—”

“The females?” Wilson said.

“The males,” Cricket said. “So the rains are gone, which means it's mating season now, and they're itching to fly off to the trees and do what birds do in mating season.”

“Not to mention bees,” Wilson said.

“It's cruel to keep them apart any longer,” Cricket said. “Here goes.”

The ribbons that held the cages together at the top came undone with a single pull; the ribs fell apart. Wilson and Cricket shielded their eyes against the sun as the birds ascended in a yellow cloud into the bright blue sky.

The Tinka band played sentimental tunes that sounded like the music of a calliope. Awkward couples danced across the grass. A drunk fat lady in a pink dress waltzed alone, flinging her arms out as she spun around. After the dancing there was champagne and caviar, followed by a luncheon of roast chicken and
smoked ham, asparagus, new potatoes, salad, cheese, fruit. During dessert, three brown children in child-size suits and bow ties chased a little white dog into the hedge maze. They got lost in there and had to be rescued by an Indian woman in a sari with a baby in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. A few paunchy middle-aged men stuck close to the punch bowl, drinking one cup of rum punch after another and talking about the
Nikkei
index. These were people Wilson did not know.

“Who the hell do you think they are?” Cricket whispered as the two of them stood in the receiving line after lunch. “You're looking at the Thirty Captains, plus wives and families. The Portugee told them to come, so here they are.”

“You're kidding!” Wilson said.

“All of them except Dad,” Cricket said. “He's off sulking somewhere. Thinks you're a bad choice for a son-in-law.”

“Long as he doesn't make me walk the plank.”

The Thirty Captains proved to be a disappointingly mundane lot. They patted Wilson on the back in a fatherly way, offered grave, polite congratulations as if this were any other middle-class wedding. Wilson had expected eyes full of cruel fire, earrings, parrots, velvet pantaloons; instead he got middle management in slightly dated Pierre Cardin suits. Ordinary fellows whose lives at sea as slavers and pirates made no mark that showed in their faces.

“That's the thing about evil,” Dr. Boursaly said later, the red smear of evening blooming over the jungle behind him. “It doesn't exist in the end. Not only is it possible to murder a hundred people and sit down to tea and toast undisturbed by conscience an hour later—I have seen it happen!”

“You're wrong there, Doctor,” Wilson said. “Evil exists, especially here. All you have to do is walk down the slope of Quatre Sables any day of the week.”

“That's what I like about you,” the doctor said. “You haven't let the heat sap your moral certainties …” then he looked right and left and leaned close, spilling half a cup of the pink punch across his
shoes. The Tinka band started on a tinny rendition of something by the Beatles. “It's too late for me,” the doctor whispered. “But I have been thinking about what you said when the rains started. You've still got some fire in your gut, Wilson. Here's a piece of well-considered advice—Do something. Bide your time and wait for the right moment or until you can't stand it anymore. Then hit them as hard as you can.”

Red and yellow stars exploded in the darkness above the garden; the baroque facade of the Villa Real was lit by brilliant flashes of color and light. Don Luis had hovered in the background all day, a sad ghost haunting his own house. Wilson found him now at midnight, and shook his hand. The man looked tired, older than Wilson remembered.

“I want to thank you,” Wilson said. “You've been very gracious about this. Thanks for the party and thanks for the use of the suit.”

Don Luis made an inexpressible gesture, halfway between exhaustion and resignation. His mustache drooped sadly in the half-light of the torches.

“It was the wedding I had always planned for Susan and myself,” he said after a beat. “I have been saving the fireworks and the silk for Susan's dress for several years now. Why let them go to waste?”

“Still, you stuck to your word—”

“No.” Don Luis interrupted. “I am an aristocrat! The only thing that separates me from”—he hesitated—“you and the rest of the rabble is my word—that is to say, my sense of personal honor. This has been so for a thousand years in my family. It is my misfortune that I was born into a world that has no use for honor of any kind.”

The sound of breaking glass drew Wilson's attention away for a moment, and when he turned back, the Portugee was gone, faded off into the baroque shadows of his garden.

A few seconds later, Cricket rustled up in her silks, her hair loosed from its silver net, her face flushed with wedding punch.

“I've been looking for you,” she said, and Wilson saw that she was drunk.

“Here I am,” Wilson said.

“Do you love me?” Cricket said.

For a beat, Wilson did not know how to respond. His passion for her was undeniable—but love? Wilson figured he didn't understand the emotion. This marriage was an expedient. Better married to Cricket than strangled and chopped up into little pieces. Alive, he could figure a way to get out, and maybe he could take her with him. Maybe in some other part of the world, far from the moral uncertainties of Quatre Sables, he would come to love her in the way he had loved Andrea before things went sour and the dread locked him away from the world more completely than any prison.

Cricket seemed to read his thoughts. She bit her lip and looked down. “O.K. I shouldn't have asked. So the situation isn't real great just now, sort of a shotgun wedding. But we'll get off this island one day, and we'll go to another island—I mean the Ile St.-Louis in the middle of the Seine in the middle of Paris, and we'll buy a big old gloomy town house with high ceilings and dusty chandeliers and we'll be happy and you'll fall completely in love with me there because we'll be free and you won't be able to help yourself.”

“Yes,” Wilson said, and just then he wanted to believe that what she said was true.

The sharp tang of the fireworks still hung in the air at three in the morning. Cricket took Wilson by the hand and led him across the littered acre of grass, over the stone bridge spanning the moat where the sheep lay sleeping at this uncertain hour, and into the courtyard of the villa. The ancient house stood lifeless, its windows staring down like empty eyes. The fountain plashed quietly in the cobbled darkness. The entrance hall smelled of mold and the wax of candles long gone. Cricket felt her way up the stairs, along shadowy corridors, through dim portrait-lined galleries at whose dimensions Wilson could only guess. They came to a set of double doors and passed through them into a large chamber, empty except for a big white
bed hung with mosquito netting, and a single straight-backed wooden chair. Casement windows stood open onto the garden below, and a few mosquitoes droned lightly in the cool night air.

“You forgot to carry me over the threshold,” Cricket said. In a single gesture she stepped out of her skirts, and the silk gleamed like a pool of water on the floor around her ankles.

Wilson took off his borrowed suit, folded it carefully over the back of the chair. Then, he lifted her in his arms and the mosquito netting parted for them like smoke, and they were in bed and their hands were upon each other. When he was inside her, Wilson heard a strange cat cry from the jungle. Afterward, he thought of the equator, passing across land and sea not a hundred miles beyond their window, an invisible line circling the earth.

A week later, Wilson and Cricket left the room with the single chair and the big bed, and got into her Volkswagen Thing and took the road that led through the Portugee's orchards and fields, through the jungle into town. The heat had returned with full ferocity in the previous day or two, and the island felt like a blast furnace. The vinyl of the driver's seat burned Wilson's legs through his shorts. Cricket wore a floppy straw hat with a brim as wide as a bicycle tire, a tank top and shorts, and Swiss-made sunglasses with special black lenses that rendered even the maddening glare of tropical noon into a murky green twilight.

“These glasses are great,” Cricket said, “but I can't see for shit. I hope you don't mind driving.”

“That's fine,” Wilson said.

“This is the worst season here,” she said. “The beginning of
summer. Good time to get out of Dodge. How do you feel about a little trip?”

“Where are we going?” Wilson said.

“You could call it a working honeymoon,” Cricket said, and was about to say more when they passed into the jungle and the steam heat beneath the leaves hit them like a wall, and all of a sudden it was too hot to speak. The shanty city was little better. Garbage lay rotting in the middle of the street in large fetid piles. Human femurs stuck out of the rubbish, common as chicken bones.

At Cricket's direction Wilson pulled the Thing into the waterfront complex, drove around the barracoon and down an alley flanked by cinder-block walls topped with broken glass set in cement. He stopped before a steel gate covered with corrugated sheeting. Cricket leaned across his lap and beeped the horn, two long, one short. The idling engine made a beating sound as they waited. At last Wilson heard the grating of steel on steel, and the gate swung open to reveal a working boatyard. Mustapha waved them in. Wilson parked alongside a dilapidated air-conditioned trailer of the kind he had seen in low-rent trailer parks back home.

The
Compound Interest
sat in dry dock at the far end of the boatyard. A structure of unpainted wooden ribs supported the vessel above the concrete ramp that led down to the black water of the harbor. A crew of workmen labored on her deck in the hot sun. Wilson saw with a pang that the splendid white experiment of the Atlantic crossing was no more. The retractable Mylar beach umbrella sails were gone, the barbecue pit, the polished brightwork. The hull showed a new blue-green camouflage pattern, and aft of the bow cage a marine cannon of indeterminate specifications had been bolted to the deck. The navigational octagon was now protected by steel plating with slits just wide enough to admit the barrels of automatic weapons. Suspended from the stern, a workman struggled to remove the walnut nameplate with a dull screwdriver.