The Pirate's Daughter (30 page)

“The BPF,” Tulj said.

“Which one's that?” Wilson said.

“The Bupu Patriotic Front,” Tulj said. “But it doesn't really matter. Could just as easily be the ANM or the BPP or the APP or the BNCM. It's all a load of manure; they're all a bunch of murderous bastards, just out to grab what they can take, and the country be damned.”

The truck bumped over shell craters down the hill into the city center. Fighting here had been quite recent. Wilson saw abandoned ordnance, streets blockaded with fresh barbed wire. Stripped corpses lay in the middle of the road dead ahead. The driver didn't bother to turn out of the way, and Wilson felt a bump and a sick, cracking sound that sent the bile rising in his throat.

“Where the hell are we going?” Wilson said.

“Don't worry. The best bar in town,” Tulj said. “I think I owe you a drink.”

The truck jounced around a rutted square with a smashed fountain and swung wide down a rather grand street divided by a median strip piled with rubble. Tulj tapped the driver on the shoulder, the truck stopped, and Wilson and Tulj got out. They stood in the cloud of blue exhaust, staring at each other as the truck pulled away. Tulj could not keep a smile from his face. Wilson didn't know what to say.

“This is my lucky day,” Tulj said, “my very lucky day.”

Wilson considered a moment. “You don't find it strange …” His voice trailed off.

“You've heard of Carew and Rawlinson?” Tulj said.

“I've heard of Carew,” Wilson said, “the famous explorer.”

“Yes, they were both English explorers who came to tell us poor Africans how to find lakes and rivers we already knew how to find, but that is beside the point. In 1824 they journeyed to Bupanda quite unknown to each other and for entirely different purposes. In March of that year they met quite by accident on the road to Bongola. They were the only two Europeans in equatorial Africa at that time. The philosopher Jung called it synchronicity, but we studied Jung at the university, and in my opinion, the man was a quack. Let's go get a drink.”

He put his hand on Wilson's shoulder, and they went off across the square.

There wasn't much left of the Star of Africa, once the most elegant hotel between Cape Town and Fez. King Edward VII had stayed there in the days before Victoria's death when he was still the Prince of Wales, as had Stanley after his trek to find Livingstone, and more recently Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during the making of
Cleopatra
. The upper floors, shelled during the early days of the civil war, stared out blank and empty on the Avenue of July 16, 1960. The famous veranda sagged under the weight of sandbags and heavy spools of barbed wire, its wooden columns half eaten away by termites.

But by some miracle of war, the Colonial Room Bar had survived intact. Wilson almost gasped when he passed through a heavy velvet curtain from the rubble of the lobby into the plush dimness of the
bar. Waiters in white jackets and bow ties carried trays of drinks between glossy tables and leather booths to the light hum of polite conversation and the rattle of ice in glasses. Broad-bladed ceiling fans turned the hot air overhead with a lazy shooping sound. The bar itself was a magnificent fantasy of rosewood and mahogany, carved natives and crocodiles and snakes with inlaid silver eyes. A full-length portrait of Queen Victoria in her regalia as Empress of India hung on a dusty gold rope over the impressive array of bottles. European businessmen in light-colored suits mixed with party officials and dark soldiers in dress uniforms. Cigar smoke rose to the pressed tin ceiling in a suffocating cloud.

“We will have to get a jacket and tie from the maître d',” Tulj said. “Those are the rules. A jacket and tie must be worn at all times.”

A few minutes later, dressed in blue wool blazers and stained, oversize striped ties from the seventies, they were shown to a booth near the bar.

“This is quite a place,” Wilson said. “Like having a drink in a time capsule.”

“Yes,” Tulj said. “Makes you forget about the war for a few minutes. It's practically the only shred of civilization left in our poor country. My father was a waiter here before independence, when no blacks were allowed. President-for-Life Sequhue staged a sit-in at the bar in 1954. In the sixties he used to come here in black tie and white evening jacket for his gin and bitters every Wednesday night at eight o'clock exactly, and continued to do so even after he had outlawed Western ways. It is out of respect for that great man that the bar has been preserved as you see it.”

Tulj motioned to one of the waiters, who came over and shook his hand. “This is my brother-in-law Ranji,” he said.

Ranji shook Wilson's hand. He was a Bupu with a reddish complexion and bald patches in his hair.

“I recommend a gin and bitters,” Tulj said.

“Is that what you're going to have?” Wilson said.

“Always,” Tulj said.

“Sounds good to me,” Wilson said.

Ranji went off toward the bar. Tulj watched him go, then pointed at the portrait of Victoria, barely visible through the cigar smoke haze.

“Out in the bush they believe the old queen is still alive,” he said. “They call her
nu Wan-lazi
—that is the Great Mother—and they say she watches over childbirth and the hearth, along with the goddess Buzu, who is the patroness of birth pains in the old religion. I am an educated man, as you know, so I reject all such superstitions, but I will say this—Victoria presided over a great era in our history. The Mpwanza Canal was built, linking Lake Bupu to the sea. Many roads were carved through the jungle, as was the railroad, which we still use today, and also many hospitals and schools were constructed. The best of us were educated at government expense at mission schools, then sent to Cambridge University in England, and trained to be good administrators. My grandfather was one of these. Yes, the land was exploited, diamonds were taken, timber, tin, copper, but we were given a great gift in return. We were given the gift of law, which brought the blessings of peace. All that is gone now. Now we Bupandans drown each other in our own blood.”

Ranji brought the gin and bitters on a battered silver tray, and Tulj and Wilson drank for a while in silence. Wilson watched the crowd at the bar, drinking and talking beneath the steady gaze of Victoria as if beneath the scrutiny of Civilization itself—and for a moment, it was almost possible to believe that certainty still existed, that order was more than the illusion that Cricket claimed it to be.

Tulj sighed and leaned forward. There was a great weariness in his eyes. “I will tell you what has happened to me since the cockfights in your country,” he said.

“O.K.,” Wilson said.

“After you saved us from the mob, my brother and I escaped through the trees, and walked back to the city along the interstate highway. The journey took several hours beneath the unusual stars
of that evening, and during those hours my fear quieted, and I began to think seriously for the first time in many years. I realized that I was not safe anywhere in the world—not even in America locked in my own bedroom in my own house—as long as the civil war continued and a single Anda was left alive. The country people here have a saying—In the year of the lion the safest place to be is with the lions. So I resolved to return and join my fellow Bupus in the patriotic struggle.

“I sold my possessions and took a plane to Bujumbola and crossed the border on foot and joined up with the BPF, who were then fighting in the jungle east of Seme. I fought with them for five months and saw much senseless killing. Once—and my heart shrinks from the memory—we came upon an Anda village full of women and children. We took the children for slaves and raped the women and killed them. I shall never be able to forget that a few of my comrades cut the heart from a sixteen-year-old girl while she was still alive, divided it between them, ate it, and then fornicated with her dead and bleeding body. Perhaps I have become soft living in America, but this is one tribal custom which I feel should be dispensed with. I was so struck with horror at this act that I made another resolution on the spot. This time I vowed to find a middle way between Bupu and Anda, but before I tell you any more, Mr. Wilson, I must have the answer to a few important questions.”

“O.K.,” Wilson said.

Tulj paused and reached into his pocket and extracted his pack of Egyptian cigarettes. There were two left. He offered one to Wilson, who shook his head. Then he lit up and put the match out in a ceramic ashtray marked “Star of Africa” in gold letters around the side. When he looked up again, his eyes were hard.

“First, why are you in the company of these evil men?” he said.

“I'm not with the evil men, not really,” Wilson said. “It's the woman, the one with the red hair. I followed her across the Atlantic in a boat. It's a long story. Now, she's my wife.”

“Ah, a woman,” Tulj said as if he understood.

“In a word,” Wilson said.

Tulj thought for a second. “Are you a party to slaving operations in my country, Mr. Wilson?”

“Not by choice,” Wilson said.

“But you have the confidence of men who are?”

“More or less.”

“You are not with them, you are certain—”

“I'll try to be very clear,” Wilson said. “I suppose I always knew the world could be a pretty bad place, but until recently I lived a careful, selfish existence and turned away from the badness and pretended it didn't exist. I still do not believe that vice is the natural condition of the world's multitudes, but perhaps I am a foolish optimist. The pirate Page and his murderous band of cutthroats are making things worse for everyone. If I can do anything to stop them, I will. Even if it costs me my life.” He felt self-conscious saying it this way, but he meant what he said, and meaning it gave him a slight tingly sensation in his toes.

Tulj nodded, satisfied. “Very good,” he said. “Then it is not blind chance but divine Providence that has set us on each other's paths again. Certain friends of mine have a theory. They say it is now very profitable for Bupu and Anda to fight each other, so each side may take slaves to sell to businessmen from industrialized countries. They believe if we stop the slave trade, we stop the war. I agree with them.”

“Who are your friends?” Wilson said.

Tulj shook his head. “First, will you help us?”

Wilson glanced at Queen Victoria over the bar and squared his shoulders. “Do you have a cigarette?”

The Mwtutsi flowed dark as dried blood through the green twilight of the jungle. Extravagantly plumed birds and monkeys with fluffy white tails watched from the tangled branches along the banks. Wilson could not hear a single sound over the thrumming of the engines; even the mosquitoes were silent. This was the quietest jungle he had yet experienced, like a strange green cathedral, though to which god it was consecrated he could not say: an unknown deity of absurd fecundity and sudden death. Corpses of soldiers, half eaten by crocodiles, floated past the
Dread
's camouflaged hull, bobbing gently in the water on their way to the sea two hundred miles away.

Twenty miles past the old logging station at Ulundi, the river fanned out into a swamp of muddy islands and lily-clogged channels. They made slow progress through this morass. The
Dread
's deep-sea sonar system was fouled by the closeness of the jungle, and the pirate was forced to resort to an old-fashioned lead plumb on a nylon line to gauge the depths of the channels through the mud. Wilson went forward with this primitive device and spent two days perched in the bow cage lowering and raising the nylon line. He didn't mind this duty; it allowed him to stay away from the others and gave him time to think. For most of the journey a black-winged tree shrike with a long plumed tail followed in their wake, alighting from time to time on taffrail or stern rail, but like the other birds that Wilson saw in the trees, it didn't seem to make a sound.

“If I were an African, I'd say that bird meant no good for us, some kind of evil spirit or something.” Schlüber had come forward to smoke a cigarette, his sand-colored hair ruffling in the tepid breeze, pale blue eyes reflecting the green of the jungle. He leaned over the bow cage and watched the shrike circle the ship once and
fly off into the trees. “Have you noticed that bloody thing's been following us since Ulundi?”

“Yes,” Wilson said. “But you guys should be pretty much immune to bad luck by this time.”

“What do you mean?” Schlüber said.

“How many slaving raids have you been on?” Wilson said. He lowered the plumb line into the black water and drew it up. “Seventeen and a half feet,” he called aft.

“Aye, aye,” Cricket called from the octagon, and the
Dread
's twin diesels thrummed up an octave, and the vessel inched forward through the muck.

“Been at it six years now,” Schlüber said. “About three jobs a year, so we're looking at eighteen, twenty jobs, I guess.”

“O.K.,” Wilson said. “I would think if bad luck or fate or justice—whatever you want to call it—were going to catch up with you, it would have caught up with you after number three or four. Way I figure it, after fifteen, you're home free till Judgment Day.”

“You don't get it,” Schlüber said. “This one's different. We've never gone into the interior before, and frankly I'm quaking in my boots. The old
Storm
Car's too big for river travel; this tub's just shallow enough; she'll make it all the way up to Lake Tsuwanga, which is as godforsaken as it gets. Before this, we'd go to Kemal or Brass or any one of a half dozen trading stations along the coast above Rigala and pick up the cargo from native wholesalers. Safe enough, so of course the markup is outrageous, sometimes two hundred and ten percent per unit. Now Captain Page has decided to eliminate the middleman entirely. We're headed to the source, my friend. Risky, if you ask me, but the profit is potentially huge.”