The Pirate's Daughter (8 page)

“Do you mind if I put the radio on?” Wilson said, still restless from the turmoil of the evening.

The chauffeur shook his massive head. “Can't do it,” he said. “Boss doesn't like music.” Wilson glanced over his shoulder and could just barely make out the shadowy outline of Luis de la Vaca through the one-way glass.

Wilson got out of the car at the far side of the bridge. The stars above the great Gothic pilings were going pale, a purplish light rising in the east. He stepped around and knocked on the back window. After a moment the glass hummed down with a faint musical note. Luis de la Vaca's face appeared, half in shadow, half in light.

“Hey, thanks for the ride,” Wilson said. “I'll take it from here.” He waved in the direction of the bridge.

The gambler was silent, then he said, “You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”

Wilson nodded, digesting this.

“Prince Henry the Navigator told that to one of my ancestors five hundred years ago. His name was Gil Eannes; he was the first white man to sail around the hip of Africa, which was thought impossible. And I extend the same advice to you.”

“Thanks,” Wilson said.

“But the next time, you may be sure, the peril will be much greater, Mr. Lander.” And the window hummed up again, and the car pulled a U-turn and bumped over the cobbles into the brightening city.

Wilson followed the fading stars across the bridge and through the bare industrial streets of the Rubicon District. A few of the warehouses showed activity; the delivery trucks along Overlook Avenue were warming their engines. When he reached his apartment, the clock on the mantel read 5:20
A.M
. He had to be at work in little under three hours. He took off his jacket and shoes and emptied his pockets of comb and wallet and house keys, the torn half of a playing card—the jack of hearts—and something else, two crumpled five-hundred-dollar bills. It was more than he took home in two weeks of work at the Tea Exchange.

When he got out of the shower a half hour later, the phone rang. He stood dripping on the bathroom tiles and let it ring until his machine picked up.

“Wilson, I know you're there,” Cricket's voice called through the speaker. “Answer the phone.”

He wrapped a towel around his gut and went out into the living room. “Do you always call at six in the morning?” he said when he picked up the receiver.

“No, but this is important,” Cricket said. “I wanted to tell you last night, but you blew me off.”

“I didn't blow you off, I—”

“Hush,” she interrupted, “I've got a ship. A fancy experimental sailing yacht called the
Compound Interest
, out of Santa Barbara, California. This incredibly rich investment type is in the middle of sailing around the world. Put in yesterday for supplies, and a couple of the crew deserted to get married. So they need a navigator's mate and an assistant cook, and I thought—”

“Cricket, wait a minute.”

“What?”

“I don't know the first thing about sailing, and I don't travel well. I told you that.”

The phone crackled with morning static.

“Hello?” Wilson said.

“Wilson,” she whispered at last, “do you know what a sailor is? I was going to tell you the day we had lunch, but I didn't get the chance. Do you know what a sailor is?”

“Someone who sails,” Wilson said.

“Wrong,” Cricket said. “A sailor is a guy looking for a way out.”

Wilson didn't say anything.

“The hypos are upon you, Wilson,” Cricket said. “I can smell them on your clothes. Something's eating at your guts. I count it high time you get yourself to sea.”

“That's ridiculous,” Wilson said, but his voice wavered a little.

“Do you have thirteen hundred dollars on hand?”

“No,” Wilson said.

“Then I can loan you the money. You're going to need it for some gear and for your assistant cook's license. There's actually some sort of exam, but we can waive all that. I've got connections at the union. Can you peel potatoes, fry an egg? That's all you need to know.”

“Cricket—”

“Meet me at the Mariners' Union Hall downtown today at noon. I'll take care of the paperwork, but you'll need to sign everything and hand over the money in person.”

Wilson looked over at the two crumpled five-hundred-dollar bills lying with his keys and comb on the foyer table. The tarot cards were there still, propped against a vase full of withered flowers that had been fresh when Andrea gave them to him a month before. He closed his eyes for a second and saw Cricket's hair in the moonlight, glowing against the dark nights of strange and doubtful seas, the smell of jungle islands in the air, the salt tang of faraway lagoons,
Southern Cross rising on the horizon. Dread tugged him back to reality.

“No, Cricket,” he said at last. “I can't go with you.”

“Why not?” She sounded disappointed. “I just can't.”

“Look, are you happy where you are? With your life? Because it doesn't seem to me—”

“There's too much holding me here.”

“Like what?”

“I'm not going to explain myself to you at six in the morning.”

“Come on, Wilson—”

“No.”

When he hung up the phone, he went into the kitchen and ate his breakfast, a bowl of bran cereal, which he munched slowly and carefully. Then, he went into the bedroom, put on a fresh blue button-down, a pair of dress khakis, a flowered tie, and a pair of tasseled loafers, which he spit-polished with a paper towel, and he thought about the day ahead. Offices have an unforgettable stale smell; they smell of beige plastic and fluorescent lights and powdery dust no one can see.

Soon it was 7:00
A.M
. In a half hour, Wilson would walk six blocks down to the roundabout and catch the bus into the city. But now, he went into his bedroom with a screwdriver from the box under the kitchen sink, and took the air-conditioning unit out of the bedroom window and pulled open the casement. The bright stars were gone now, given way to the haze of another morning—who could say when the stars would come like that again?—and the city steamed banal in the ordinary light.

Wilson sat in the window for a long time, legs dangling against the side of the building, a warm wind on his face, missing buses and watching the big tankers of the Black Star Line, long as city blocks, rise off their moorings in the channel below.

The
Compound Interest
sat low and gleaming in the water at the Presidential Slip of the Harvey Marina.

“ ‘… eighty-five feet from stem to stern, her radical new carrot-shaped hull has been wind tunnel—tested in California by NASA scientists,' ” Cricket read aloud from a xeroxed copy of an article out of July's
Yachting News
. “ ‘An onboard computer gauges the currents, satellite uplinks give precise coordinates,' blah, blah, blah, ‘the experimental conical sails of tough, weather-resistant Mylar fibers raise and lower themselves as if hoisted by a crew of ghosts—' Disgusting, don't you think?” Cricket folded the article into the pocket of her jeans. “And you should see what goes on belowdecks. It's like a goddamned hotel down there. Staterooms, offices, showers. On a sailboat. There's even a walk-in refrigerator full of all kinds of food. Apparently the owner is a real heavy eater, a big gourmet. That's where you come in.”

They stood on the concrete pier just below Marina's in the Marina, its chartered terraces now filling up with the lunchtime crowd. The morning haze had burned off to blue sky, and the sun shone high and bright directly above the Harvey Channel. The
Compound Interest
's strange conical sails stood out against this brightness like two huge folded white beach umbrellas.

“All that stuff sounds good to me,” Wilson said. “The more comfortable the better.”

“You don't get it,” Cricket said, but she didn't try to explain.

They went up to Marina's for lunch on the terrace because it was only a few steps away. Wilson always seemed to end up there, perhaps because he hated the place so much. He ordered the lunch special of crab cakes and asparagus spears wrapped in ham, and Cricket ordered a glass of wine and the guacamole-shrimp salad. Waiting for the food, they sat enveloped in an awkward silence. They were still strangers, really, on unfamiliar ground. He watched
the professional lunchers from the Financial Mile, half afraid he'd see Andrea coming through the crowd. What could he say to her?

Cricket's rope-scarred hands looked out of place against the creased white tablecloth. She put them in her lap and nodded at the sleek vessel moored below.

“I'll tell you what,” she said, “that ugly tub should be called the Ignoble Experiment. I don't like the way she sits in the water. Too low. Like a submarine.”

“O.K.,” Wilson said, relief in his voice. “So you're not shipping out.”

Cricket turned quickly, a strand of her coppery hair loose and snaky along her neck. “I may not like her looks, but she's safer than an aircraft carrier. You read the article. Cost something like a hundred million dollars to develop and build. Got everything, all the latest equipment. Can't sink.”

“That's what they said about the
Titanic
.”

Cricket frowned into her dark sunglasses and shook her head. “There's too much negativity in your life,” she said. “You need a change of air, a new perspective.”

Maybe you're right
, Wilson thought, but he didn't say anything.

A few minutes later the waiter, a fey mustachioed youth, wearing a white dress shirt and bib overalls, brought the food. Wilson munched hopelessly on his crab cakes and asparagus, and when he looked up again, Cricket had already finished her salad and was staring right at him, sunglasses off, green eyes shining with an uncomfortable light.

“You've heard of Dwight Ackerman?” she said.

Wilson blinked. “You mean the Wall Street guy?”

“Yeah, the one they call the Attila the Hun of Mergers and Acquisitions.” Cricket leaned close at this and lowered her voice. “It's his ship. They don't tell you in the article, but I've got the inside scoop. He plans to sail it across the Atlantic, around the horn of Africa, and up into the Indian Ocean. That should take something like nine months. When we reach Rangoon at the beginning of next
fall, twenty-five thousand dollars will be deposited in your account over here. If you go the rest of the way, another twenty-five thousand dollars is yours when we make San Francisco. Fifty thousand dollars for eighteen months' work, all expenses paid. That's fifty Gs in the bank when you get home. Not fucking bad for an ordinary seaman. So, what do you think of that?”

Wilson stopped munching on his crab cakes and thought about it for a moment. The most ridiculous of schemes can be seen in a new light when there's a lot of money involved.

“I guess that sounds all right,” he said at last, and was prepared to feel good about the whole thing, but suddenly a buoy in the channel sounded its bell three times and then went abruptly silent. A distant tolling that seemed to reverberate ominously in the too-bright sky of noon.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. None of it seemed real to Wilson. He was dreaming a dream about a man who was about to leave an ordinary, settled existence of bus rides, fax machines, and canned soup for the unknown perils of the sea. This man didn't seem to resemble the Wilson he knew, the ordinary fellow plagued by uncertainty and dread that he woke up with every morning. Soon, he would snap out of it, find himself back at the office at his computer terminal, Andrea hovering tense in the background.

But for now, Wilson let the dream continue and took Cricket out to his apartment on the Rubicon bus. There, he changed out of his work clothes and packed the few items in his possession that might be suitable for a long voyage. Cricket lounged on the couch watching a game show on Wilson's small black-and-white TV. She had no
interest in the books, mostly ancient classics and archaeological texts, that completed the backdrop of his life.

“You should thank God that you can't take any of that shit with you,” Cricket said when they went down the narrow stairs into the street.

“What shit?” Wilson said.

“All those books,” she said. “Sophocles, Aeschylus, all the rest of those dead white bastards. Books are bad for the soul. Took me awhile to learn that. They make you forget about real life.”

“So what's real life supposed to be like as far as you're concerned?” Wilson said.

“Full of action,” Cricket said. “What else?”

They took the bus back across the river. As they bounced over the potholes of Buptown, windows rattling, Wilson told Cricket about his experience at the cockfight. He had been reluctant to say anything, reluctant to confirm the odd opinion she had of him—he was an ordinary guy, not a gambler or an adventurer—but it had been one of the most extraordinary evenings of his life so far.

Cricket listened quietly, her face reflected as a sunny blur in the gravel-scratched glass. “Yes, I know all about that,” she said when he finished. “You were great. A real hero.”

“You were there?” Wilson said, surprised. “I didn't see you or any other woman in the crowd.”

She shook her head. “I got there really late, with some friends. Just in time to see you throw your money away on those two miserable Bupus. Then you jumped down from that car, and I lost you in the crowd. A few minutes later, someone said you had left in a limousine. So how much did you win?”

Wilson hesitated. Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. “Sixteen thousand,” he mumbled.