The Pirate's Daughter (39 page)

Cricket turned a lazy eye, then she giggled and flexed her toes. “What do you think?” she said. “Jungle Red.”

“If you want the truth,” Wilson said, “I never liked that color.”

“You're a real bastard,” Cricket said, then she swung her leg off the chair, and in a split second her mood changed, and she began to sob like a child. She sobbed in great openmouthed gasps till she could not breathe and began to hiccup and gasp for air. Wilson stepped around the table and tried to pull her up. She fell into his arms over the side of the chair and went limp.

“Cut it out,” Wilson said.

“No.” Cricket sniffed to the floor.

“How long have you been smoking the opium?” he said.

“Days and days, ever since we got back from M'Gongo epo,” she said in a quick monotone. “I didn't want to live without you. They were going to skin you alive. I was going to let them. I'm a monster. A freak without a heart. I love you.” She started to sob again and Wilson let her go and she slid off the chair and rolled under the library table.

“Get up,” Wilson said. “We've really got to get out of here.”

“Leave me alone,” Cricket said from under the table. “I'm fine right here. Luis is the one to worry about. He sent his beloved paintings and a lot of other art junk in this big crate last week to his family in Paris that hates his guts. This morning, when they started bombing the harbor, he asked to fuck me just one more time and he was so pathetic I let him fuck me, then I let him fuck me again right in that chair and then he smoked some shit with me, even though he gave up smoking shit about ten years ago, and he kissed me goodbye and he went upstairs. Better go check on him.”

“Where is he?” Wilson said.

“Try his room,” Cricket said. “Second floor, second corridor on the right, second door on the left. I'll wait here.”

Wilson went out of the library and up the wide staircase. The Portugee's bedroom was an austere place, the only furniture a freestanding sixteenth-century gilt crucifix and a single bed fit for a monk. The floors of black tile were polished to an amazing sheen. Wilson watched his reflection cross to the bathroom.

Don Luis's body floated faceup in the big marble tub in water that was mostly blood. The water still steamed; it hadn't been long, but it was too late. An old-fashioned straight razor with a handle of polished mother-of-pearl inlaid with silver Hebrew characters lay neatly folded on the marble side of the tub.

“If you're going to do it,” Wilson said to the body, “that's the thing to do it with.”

The Portugee's eyes were wide open, lifeless. He didn't answer in any way that Wilson could hear. Wilson paused for a moment and said a quiet prayer for the man's soul, then he went out and closed the door behind.

Downstairs in the library Cricket had passed out beneath the table. Wilson checked her pulse—she was fine, just stoned out of her mind—and he hefted her up with some difficulty and got her over his shoulder. He carried her down the corridor to the front door and out into the courtyard, threw her into the backseat of the
Thing, started it up, and drove out over the bridge just in time to meet Lieutenant Peavy and a column of marines coming up the chalk road. Wilson pulled up and got out. Cricket stirred, but she did not wake. Peavy offered Wilson a Navy Cut, and they stood contemplating the Villa Real in the day's last light.

“Looks like bloody Buckingham Palace down there,” Peavy said.

“It's not,” Wilson said. “How's the action coming?”

“Not bad,” Peavy said. “A few pockets of resistance here and there. Got them mopped by noon. Started distributing food to the natives after that. Seemed damn glad to see us.”

Wilson thought for a moment. “What will they do when the pirates are all gone?” he said slowly. “I do believe the economy of this place just got shot to hell.”

“Not up to us.” Peavy shrugged. “Up to the UN, I suppose.”

“I wonder,” Wilson said. Just then Cricket let out a faint, irritated moan.

“Your wife?” Peavy said.

“That's her.”

“She all right?”

“More or less,” Wilson said.

The marines creaked in their boots. A long tropical gloom spread over the jungle behind, and dusk came on purple and red as fresh blood. Lieutenant Peavy finished his cigarette and brought his Peter O'Toole blues to bear on Wilson.

“Anyone left in there?”

“No,” Wilson said.

“Just out of curiosity, what course of action would you propose?”

Wilson turned again to the Villa Real, brooding in shadow, full of ghosts, and he thought of its four hundred years of stone and mortar and sculptured gardens and tilled fields, all built on slavery and piracy and murder. He thought of the hundred rooms, the halls once hung with paintings of ancestors who were no less slavers and murderers and pirates for wearing high ruff collars and velvet doublets
or elegant powdered wigs and three-cornered hats, their fingers resting on a page in an open volume of Voltaire. And he thought of the Portugee up to his neck in blood, floating in the bloody water now like an embryo in formaldehyde, and he shuddered and turned away. Four hundred years isn't so long if you think of the age of the smallest stone. Time to make an end.

“I would call in an air strike,” Wilson said quietly.

“Seems a pity,” Peavy said.

“No,” Wilson said. “It's more like justice. There should be nothing left.”

Then he got back into the Thing and put it in gear and bumped down the chalk road toward town. Just before they reached the tree line, the Sea Harriers screamed overhead toward the Villa Real. Wilson flicked on the headlights and did not look back. The explosions reached him as a muffled thudding through the thick leaves and mossy silence of the jungle.

The small island, barely two hundred yards across, would sink to thirty at high tide. There were a few scraps of wood, a couple of rusted tin cans, a battered plastic bottle, not much more. Pocket-size mottled-back crabs scuttled in the surf. A single dune afforded a view of the mainland ten miles to the east, across the Bight of Benin.

They put Cricket ashore with three days' worth of food and water, just in case, and a rubber dinghy for the crossing. She set foot to sand like a cat stepping into the rain.

“This isn't fair,” she said. “Marooning me on a desert island.”

“Captain's orders, ma'am,” said Lieutenant Peavy.

Cricket stared up at the pale blue sky, the circling gulls.

“Give me a few minutes,” Wilson said to the lieutenant. “She's still my wife.”

Peavy nodded. “You've got fifteen. No more than that. They're waiting for us aboard the
Gadfly
.”

Wilson disembarked and helped Cricket drag the rubber raft over the dune to the landward side of the island. There they stood, slightly uncomfortable with each other, staring out at the faint dark rim that was Benin on the horizon.

“It won't be so bad,” Wilson said. “Shouldn't take longer than a few hours. If it does, you've got food and a water purifying kit on the raft. Once you hit the coast it's only eight miles inland to Porto-Novo. I checked it out on the map. You've got friends there, right?”

Cricket sat down on the sand and put her head on her knees. Wilson watched her coppery hair stir in the ocean wind, then he crouched beside her.

“It's got to be this way, Cricket,” he said in a quiet voice. “They wanted to turn you over to the United Nations for trial with the rest of them. I had to do quite a bit of convincing.…” His voice trailed off.

“To hell with that. I want you to come with me,” Cricket said. She lifted her head, and her eyes were defiant.

“I can't,” Wilson said, but he wouldn't look at her.

“Why not?” Cricket said.

Wilson made an exhausted gesture. “Cricket, this is painful,” he said.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Think of Webster,” Wilson said. “The same thing almost happened to me. Skinned and left out on a pole like a side of beef.”

“I'm sorry about that,” Cricket said. “But you shot Dad. You killed my father. We both have things to forgive each other for. I didn't know then how much I really needed you—”

Wilson cut her short. “What do I have to do to get a pirate divorce?”

“This
is
a pirate divorce,” Cricket said. “You're marooning me on a desert island.”

Wilson wanted to get up, go back to men waiting on the beach, but a lingering affection kept him by her side. He felt a final tug at his heart. He took her hard and callused hand and squeezed. He wanted to kiss her.

“You love me,” Cricket said, “I can feel it.”

Wilson's jaw tightened. He let go of her hand and stared out to sea. “You're right,” he said. “I do love you. I love you in the way men love war and drunkenness and everything else that is bad for them.”

Cricket said nothing.

Wilson stayed that way for a minute or so, as the sea moved and shuddered like a muscle against the bone of Africa. When he turned back, Cricket had slipped out of her shorts and T-shirt and lay naked and warm-skinned on the sand.

“Have it your own way,” she said. “But I want you to make love to me. I want you to remember what you'll be missing.”

“No,” Wilson said, but she stared at him and her eyes were a pale blue-green in the light reflected off the water and her coppery hair blew in the wind and her breasts were flecked with freckles, and Wilson did what she asked. He unzipped his pants and took her breasts in his hands. It was a bad idea. When it was over, they both felt terrible and wept and held each other.

At last a long, mournful whistle came from the
Gadfly
at anchor, and a moment after that they heard Lieutenant Peavy's voice from the other side of the dune. “We need to shove off, Mr. Lander,” he called.

Wilson stood and pulled up his pants and put his sunglasses on and ran a hand through his hair.

“I've got to go,” he said.

Cricket blinked up at him. Sand stuck to her naked body.

“I've got to go,” he said again.

“Go,” Cricket said.

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah.”

Wilson could feel her eyes on him as he turned away for the last time and went up the dune to the waiting sailors.

Later, the last light faded from the sky in the east, and the great steel prow of the HMS
Gadfly
swung north toward England, and Wilson came alone onto the quarterdeck and smoked a Navy Cut and tried to make sense of the things that had happened since he shipped out on the
Compound Interest
so many months before. His recent past presented itself in a series of dramatic images, like a slide show of scenes from the life of someone much more interesting than Wilson Lander. He took them out one by one, held them up to the light of memory and finally came to the last mournful, erotic composition: Cricket stretched out naked on the sand of a vanishing island, a riddle on her lips that he would never be able to answer.

He thought for a while longer, four cigarettes' worth, smoking slowly. The wind blew in his face; his fingers and nose grew cold. The darkness of the sea was a mask covering the earth.

The city looked the same. The same traffic and the same sky and the same sort of dusty fall afternoon, the same bohemians stumbling from one happy hour to another in the Bend, the same rusty tankers clogging the Harvey Channel, the same blue hills looming in the hazy distance of Warinocco County beyond the interstate.

Wilson went to a cheap hotel called the Rialto at the lower end of Commerce Street, not far from Buptown, and ordered up a bacon cheeseburger platter from room service and ate everything but the coleslaw and fell asleep and slept for fourteen hours. When he awoke in the early morning, it was Saturday. He put on his clothes and went out into the street and wandered among indifferent crowds. At ten-thirty he ate breakfast at a coffee shop he used to frequent where he recognized no one. Then he went into a bookstore and bought a perpetual calendar—a little plastic card with a plastic wheel—and he counted up the months and the days and discovered he had been gone two years, two months, six days, and a handful of hours. After that, he walked aimlessly, feeling lost, like a soldier returned from a war no one cared about. He thought about calling Andrea; then he thought better of the impulse. She was probably married now, with kids, deep in the life they could have shared together. Still, he felt a pang in his heart to think of a future in the city without her.

Sometime after noon he looked up and found himself in the same warehouse district where Cricket's store had been, and his heart quickened. He found the street with no difficulty and found the store there, wedged in between the rubber band warehouse and the French restaurant, which was now a Japanese-Creole restaurant called Sushi New Orleans. The stuffed monkey in the window was gone, and the orange cat was no longer in its place on the pillow near the door, but the same dismal books and love philters and grim packets of herbs and heavy black cauldrons decorated the walls.

A fortyish woman with stringy died black hair and an unpleasant face sat behind the counter. Today there was one customer, an old man in a blue jogging suit, who left quickly as Wilson approached.

“Can I help you with something?” the woman said.

“Are you Nancy?” Wilson said.

“Yes,” Nancy said, suspicion like circles beneath her eyes.

“I want my apartment back,” Wilson said.

“Who the hell are you?” Nancy said.

Wilson told her, and he told her that Cricket had arranged the sublet two years before.

“Where is Cricket now?” Nancy said.

“In Africa, I think,” Wilson said.