The Pirate's Daughter (28 page)

They lapsed into silence for the next hour. Cricket leaned into Wilson's arm, put her head on his shoulder. He could still not get used to the idea that she was his wife. When the light disappeared in the west, the sky was a black smear. The lights of Rigala showed in the distance as two or three wavering points. It would be hours before they could motor any closer to the harbor. In the absence of laws and customs regulations, going ashore required the right man on the right dock, the right amount of money changing hands. Their man wasn't due till midnight. Wilson could not see Cricket's hand upon his own in the sea darkness.

“I never liked these waters,” the pirate said. It was a disembodied statement out of the gloom.

“Seems pretty calm,” Wilson said in something like his own reasonable voice. “What's wrong with them?” He felt freer to speak now that he could not see the man.

“You were talking about luck,” the pirate said. “It's bad luck for pirates along these coasts. There's many a pirate's whitened bones at the bottom of this miserable patch of sea.”

Despite himself, a chill went up Wilson's spine.

“Not far from here, about thirty degrees north, they got the greatest pirate of them all, Bartholomew Roberts,” the pirate said. “The man was a piratical genius. In just three years he captured over
four hundred prizes. Not even my ancestor the great Elzevir Montague could beat that. But it was success that got Roberts in the end. The king sent a squadron of the British Navy, commanded by Captain Ogle in the HMS
Swallow
. Roberts had just captured a Spanish merchant vessel full of Madeira, and they were celebrating when the
Swallow
caught up with the
Royal Venture
—that was Roberts's ship. Roberts himself didn't drink, but the crew was dead drunk to a man. He couldn't get them to their stations in time, and they were outmaneuvered. The poor bastard got it in the first volley of grape-shot. The crew was stunned. There lay the great Captain Roberts, just another corpse in his high hat and feathers, his famous red coat, his hip boots. The fight barely lasted another hour after that. With Roberts dead, the crew lost its gumption. Ogle hanged all of them and would have hanged Roberts's dead body if it hadn't been dumped over the side as he requested. The world has never seen a better pirate or a braver man.”

When the moon brightened, Wilson and Cricket took a sleeping bag forward and lay on the deck beneath the steel wings of the marine cannon. They lay close, and Wilson could feel her breath on his cheek.

“Why is your father like that?” Wilson said.

“Like what?” Cricket said.

“Absolutely immoral. I would say amoral, but he's an intelligent man. He knows the difference between right and wrong. How does he justify his life of murder and slavery to himself? For that matter, how do you?”

“Don't go all serious on me,” Cricket said.

“Tell me,” Wilson said. “This is your conscience talking to you, remember?”

“It's in our blood,” she said, “just like gambling is in yours. We're pirates. Been pirates since the 1600s. You can't fight blood.”

“You're going to have to give me more than that.”

Cricket thought for a minute. “It's the social contract,” she said.
“We Pages have never believed in it. The idea that you go about treating your neighbor like you want to be treated is a crock of shit to us. We don't believe it because we look around and see that the world is the kind of place where your neighbor would stab you in the back for a spare fig. Sure, for a couple of years here and there—during the Pax Romana, say, or the 1950s—the world seemed like a safe place ruled by law and reason. That was an illusion. Maybe the trains ran on time, and there was a proliferation of lawyers, but all of it was just a smokescreen over the chaos.”

“You sound like Don Luis,” Wilson said, and felt Cricket stiffen.

“O.K., try walking down the street alone at night in certain neighborhoods in your city,” she said. “What happens to your social contract then? Out the window.”

“Let's admit for a minute that the world is an evil place,” Wilson said, “which I deny. It still doesn't give you the right to be part of the evil. We've got to keep fighting for the good, Cricket. Or at the very least not do any harm. That's your first lesson in moral philosophy.”

Cricket was silent, taking this in. “My life has been too hard to believe in goodness for its own sake,” she said. “All I've seen is big fish eating little fish. Scratch the surface, and you'll find that people have the worst motives for what they do. But stick around. I'm still hoping some of your faith in mankind will rub off before too long. What do you think?”

“It's not me sticking around,” Wilson said. “It's me getting you away from them.”

“Patience,” Cricket whispered. “We're going to need money, and we've got to pick the right moment.”

“When will that be?”

“Shut up,” Cricket said, and put her arms around Wilson, and as they kissed, the clouds drifted over the moon again, and the sky went black.

Under the same black sky at midnight the
Dread
crossed at low throttle into Rigala Harbor. Blasted derricks stood above the docks, twisted and skeletal in the flash of a distant bombardment. Half-sunken hulks leaked trails of iridescent oil across the dirty water. A searchlight trailed over low-lying clouds like a blindman's finger reading braille, then winked out.

The pirate took the wheel and guided the
Dread
to the far end of the commercial basin. A thin line of lightbulbs dangling from a bare power cable marked the length of the southernmost slip, padded with used tires. Cricket jumped onto the slip and tied the bowline to a rusty iron plug in the concrete, and the rest of the crew followed. A few minutes later the pirate solemnly distributed weapons from a heavy canvas bag that looked like it had once contained a set of golf clubs. Schlüber and Nguyen shouldered Chinese-made Kalashnikovs. Mustapha took an over-and-under and a machete in a wooden scabbard. Cricket took a MAC-10 machine pistol, a hunting knife, and a vinyl bag of extra clips. The captain took a 12-gauge semiautomatic shotgun and a 9 mm Beretta.

Wilson hesitated. He didn't like the look of the situation.

“Why do we need these?” he said at last.

The pirate frowned. “Because this country is a fucking snake pit,” he said. “Full of banditos and the like. Don't be such a citizen. Choose your weapon.”

Wilson peered into the bag. He saw an assault rifle, a few pistols, bayonets in greening scabbards. He took one of the bayonets, fixed it to his belt, and selected an ancient revolver in a leather holster. A torn bit of leather strapping dangled from a ring at the base of the grip.

The pirate chuckled, took the revolver from Wilson's hand, broke open the chamber, spun it around.

“It figures,” he said. “An old eight-shot Webley-Vickers, World War One vintage. Check the holster.”

Wilson turned the holster over. Scraped into the leather on the back was a short inscription: “Ubi Bene, Ibi Patria. Lt. J. F. Hooks, 12th Rgt. 2nd. Btln. Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Flanders, 1917.”

Wilson read it out loud.

The pirate nodded. “The dumbshit officers in those days used to go over the top with nothing more than that pistol and a whistle. For God and country and such shit. They got blown to bits. Perfect for you.”

He handed it back and fished out a leather pouch of extra ammunition; then, armed and ready, the landing party marched up the slip toward a concrete blockhouse at the far end.

A dozen or so soldiers of the Bupu militia dressed in ragged fatigues squatted around a fire in front of the blockhouse. Well-oiled assault rifles hung off their backs. Their mouths were stuffed with something that looked like dried tobacco, torn from a pile of greenish black leaves in a tattered cardboard shoe box being passed around. They stared into the fire and chewed and spit black juice at the burning scrap wood. As the landing party approached, one of the soldiers stood and leveled his weapon. The others didn't bother to turn around. Captain Page gave his shotgun to Cricket and stepped into the light of the fire. After a brief exchange in Bupu and sign language, the pirate was led into the blockhouse. The rest of the landing party stood waiting uneasily in the shadows.

Wilson heard a faint booming that was the artillery bombardment on the outskirts and the sput-sput sound of the men spitting.

“What if our friend didn't show up tonight?” Schlüber whispered.

“Then they kill us,” Nguyen said out loud, “and our problems over.”

Mustapha grinned at this in the darkness.

“Comforting thought,” Schlüber said.

“So what is that shit?” Wilson said.

“What shit?” Cricket said.

“The soldiers,” Wilson said. “What are they chewing?”

“Like a bunch of bloody cows having a go at their cuds, if you ask me,” Schlüber said.

“Kaf,” Mustapha said. “Makes you talk to God.”

“That shit's one of the reasons why things are so fucked up here,” Cricket said. “It's a narcotic weed, wouldn't be so dangerous in tea. I've had kaf tea, actually—a mild stimulant, something like an espresso with a shot of brandy. But these characters have been chewing kaf since about noon with nothing in their stomachs except maybe a bottle of tejiyaa. After about six hours of chewing you start to hallucinate. Most of the fighting here goes on at night, when everyone is totally out of their heads and seeing ghosts and demons coming at them out of the dark. At that point no one knows who they are shooting at, and no one cares.”

Captain Page came out of the blockhouse fifteen minutes later with a young militia officer in a clean khaki uniform. The officer shook the captain's hand and stepped over to say a few inaudible words to his men. A grumble went up, and there was more spitting. The officer reached down, snatched up the cardboard shoe box of kaf, held it over the fire, and screamed an order in a high, sharp voice. One of the soldiers rose with a heavy sigh and adjusted his assault rifle. Four others followed his lead, and this motley escort led the landing party up the slip through an opening in a wall of sandbags and into the dark night of Rigala.

Wilson saw vague streets full of craters, burned-out buses and cars, sidewalks clotted with rubble. A bunch of decomposing corpses were piled against a tumbledown wall, frozen in macabre-comic poses by the effects of rigor mortis. Rats scuttled everywhere. Telephone poles and streetlights had been knocked over to barricade the intersections.

From what Wilson could tell in the darkness, this part of the city dated from the colonial era. It was a district that had once been full of wrought-iron balconies and pastel colonnades and terrace restaurants, like the kind he remembered from Buptown back home. Now the buildings were abandoned and broken. The city held the quiet of the tomb. Cats watched from the empty doorways, their yellow eyes glowing with detached curiosity. The soldiers did not speak. They loped alongside like wolves, the straps of their rifles making a faint leather-creaking noise.

“This used to be such a beautiful city,” Cricket said in a low voice. “Now it's mostly depopulated. Everyone is dead or living in the bush or gone across to wallow like pigs at Quatre Sables.”

The soldiers led them along a narrow alley between the remains of two large buildings piled up like a mess of Legos, across a vacant lot, and up a hill into the residential sector. Here they followed a broad avenue through a park in which all the palm trees had been burned to black sticks. In the middle of the park on a bullet-scarred pedestal stood an impressively large statue of an African man wearing a 1960s-era three-button suit. In one hand he held an open book; in another, a native ashtzisi, the staff of carved wood and buffalo horn that was the badge of a Bupu chief. He was probably sixty feet high and twenty feet broad at the shoulders. A small chunk of his nose was missing, and bullet holes pocked his jacket, but otherwise he seemed intact.

“That's President Sequhue,” the pirate said over his shoulder, his voice ringing hollow in the empty city. At the name one of the soldiers shot over a hostile look, but the pirate continued. “In 1960 Sequhue worked out the terms of independence with the U.K. They called him the Bupandan Gandhi. He was a short little guy, wrote poetry, studied at Cambridge in the thirties. From about 1961 to '75, they had a sort of golden age here in Bupanda, mostly because of Sequhue's progressive policies. In those days it was a prosperous country, very Western in outlook.

“Then Sequhue got sick with spinal meningitis and experienced some sort of mystical revelation and decided all at once the Western influence had to go He outlawed capitalism and due process, beer, the wearing of pants and shirts, the use of zippers—people were shot for using zippers—he kicked out all foreign nationals, gained about two hundred pounds, and took a harem of something like a thousand wives. Then he outlawed Christianity and tried to revive the old animistic religions. They say there were human sacrifices right here in the medina. The civil war started up soon after that. Unfortunately all those bad old Western ideas about the rights of the individual were the only thing keeping the Bupus and Andas from each other's throats. Soon they reverted to the same old crap, the slaughter and slavery they'd practiced for a millennium before the British came in the 1870s.

“Sequhue wasn't mad, understand? Just an idealist. They're the worst kind. He decided the Western model promoted selfish materialism and personal corruption and at the same time didn't make people happy. ‘Look at New York, look at London,' he said in a famous speech. ‘Go there and find me one good, happy man!' Hell, I guess the old bastard had a point. But it was just the thing this country didn't need. Millions died in the civil war, and there's still no end in sight. I'm not complaining. It's great for business.”