Djibouti

by Elmore Leonard

  “For four months,” Dara said.

  “Or longer. ‘Take in the mains’l. Lay down to the galley and put on some chow.’ ‘Aye, aye, Skipper.’ I sound like an idiot.”

  “You don’t get seasick?”

  “I get bored.”

  “You don’t have to go.”

  Helene said, “You don’t know what’s at stake. Billy’s almost twenty years older than I am. We marry and he ever passes away? I’d be something like the thirtieth-richest woman in America.”

  “He told you that?”

  “An inducement, giving me a goal.”

  “It could be a long wait,” Dara said. “He seems in good health. He doesn’t smoke.”

  “Cigars,” Helene said. “You think I’m out of my mind?”

  “You must like him—”

  “I do. He’s kind…he’s thoughtful…He’s funny sometimes. He calls Obama ‘that spear-chucker we got in the White House,’ but Billy likes him, I can tell.” She looked at Dara’s reflection again.

  “You married?”

  “I’ve been too busy,” Dara said, “to think about it.”

  “But you’re not, are you, a lesbian? Some of the girls I work with are. They’re nice, not especially bitchy. Sometimes I’ll tell a guy I’m one to shut him down.”

  Dara said, “I like guys. But I like whatever I’m doing right now, whatever I want, more. I lived with a lawyer once—he didn’t want to get married either. He’d tell me why we were better off single living together and go through a, b, c, once in a while, d. He’d thought of another reason.”

  “What’s c, having sex anytime he wants?”

  “He talked constantly. He’d say things he thought were funny. He’d start telling me a fact, anything, about world populations and go on and on. One time I asked him a question about the Supreme Court he could’ve almost answered yes or no. He started talking and I wanted to shoot myself.”

  “You were fucked, and you did it to yourself,” Helene said. “Billy tells long stories about investigations—I guess for the government—and makes it sound like he’s in it. Billy goes, ‘Me? No.’ Takes a swig of champagne. ‘But I know things.’ He’s either a lovable jerkoff or, I don’t know, maybe some kind of CIA guy. But you know what’s weird? Wherever we are, I know somehow he’s going to hand me a glass of champagne.”

  “He turns you down, you’re still a runway star with the hair and the body.”

  “If I ever get in shape again. You’re the first person I’ve felt I can talk to. You know why I’d marry him, all the bullshit aside, because he’s a fucking honest-to-God billionaire. I knew you’d smile. He doesn’t have to be funny. He can talk all he wants. But why is he always handing me a glass of champagne?”

  “I wouldn’t think to get you drunk and seduce you.”

  “I’m practically bare-ass on the boat. No top, ever, out of sight of land. He doesn’t want some sneak with binoculars seeing what he’s got.”

  Dara said, “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know how long I can last.”

  “If you want to quit, go out in the boat tomorrow and throw up.”

  “I don’t get seasick.”

  “Put your finger down your throat. Or, stay with it and write a book. Tell what happens going around the world with a billionaire. And maybe around and around. You could get an advance, I think at least a million, and a pro to write it for you. What’s the difference?”

  “If he turns me down, I write the book in my own words. And if I marry him I don’t have to write the book.”

  Dara said, “I’m gonna stop worrying about you.”

  They got back to the table as Xavier and Billy Wynn were coming with a Somali in a white suit, the shirt open, a yellow scarf looped about his shoulders. Xavier calling, “Dara, we got us a pirate.”

  FIVE OF THEM SAT around the table with bottles of Blanc de Blanc Billy brought from the bar he said for openers, Xavier anxious to introduce his pirate.

  “Dara, like you to meet Idris Mohammed.”

  Idris rose to his feet and bowed.

  “Commander of a gang of swashbucklers run out in the gulf and hijack whatever ships look good. Idris say he’s never lost a man or killed any crew on the ships.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Dara said, “how happy I am to meet you. May I call you Idris?” It got a look from Xavier.

  Her pirate had those Somali cheekbones in a thin face, a good-looking guy with a neat beard and white teeth smiling at her. He said, “Yes, Idris, of course,” with an African accent.

  Dara asked him, not wasting a moment, if he thought of himself as a pirate, or had a more acceptable name for what he did. Idris smiled.

  “I think of us as the Coast Guard giving fines to ships that contaminate our seas, thousands of them leaving their waste in the waters we once fished.”

  “You were a fisherman?”

  “My family.”

  “You speak English so well—did you ever live in America?”

  “You detect that, uh? Yes, Miami University in the state of Ohio for part of several years.”

  “Wow,” Dara said. “What did you study?”

  “It was my understanding you don’t study too much there.”

  Dara smiled and then Idris smiled.

  “You’re my first pirate,” Dara said. “Did Xavier tell you what we’re doing?”

  “Making a movie, yes, about pirates. If I can help you I will. My home is in Eyl, in Somalia, but I’m here at least a week each month. I have a residence in the French Quarter and a car to get me around, a Mercedes-Benz drophead. It’s black, completely black, with dark windows to keep out the sun.”

  Sounding proud of it.

  “You drive to Eyl?”

  “Once in a while. Or I travel with a friend who has a Bentley and a driver.”

  “That wouldn’t be Ari the Sheikh Bakar, would it? Known to his chums in England as Harry?”

  “Ah, you are the one he met on the plane from Paris. Of course, Dara Barr, the filmmaker. I saw him briefly this afternoon. Yes, he said he met you, but you haven’t called him.”

  “I did, but there was no answer.”

  “Harry keeps busy. He runs around being the good guy.”

  “He said his job is to talk to pirates.”

  “Yes, he does that, tries to convince us there is no future in piracy. I tell him, who needs the future? We can make enough now to improve our lives. There is nothing dishonorable in what we do. The sea is our life.”

  “Ask him,” Billy Wynn said, “how much he thinks he’ll get for that Saudi tanker?”

  Idris said, “It’s taking months, isn’t it?” a pleasant sound to his voice. “That one isn’t mine, so I don’t know if progress is being made in negotiating a payment.”

  “They started out wanting twenty-five million,” Billy said, “the ship and its load of crude worth ten times that.”

  “Well,” Idris said, “they could settle for only two or three million, it would still be profitable.”

  “You know,” Dara said, “there are warships hunting you. The American navy, the French, German, Greek, even the Chinese.”

  “Yes, I think I saw one or two warships,” Idris said. “I believe they’re painted gray?”

  Having fun with her.

  “You and Harry,” Dara said, “are sworn enemies, but it sounds like you’re friends.”

  “Dear, we met in this club two years ago, and had a good laugh we find out I’m the bad guy and he’s the good guy. I tried to get him to quit acting respectable and become a pirate. You know what he said, ‘I don’t need to make money that way. Mother sends me an allowance. Whatever I need.’”

  “He sounds like a cool guy,” Billy said. “I should talk to him.”

  Then Idris asked Dara if she’d like to go for a drive. Dara hesitated a few seconds before she asked him to swear in the name of Allah he was a pirate and not putting her on. He swore he was a man of honor from Miami University in Ohio.


  Xavier said, “Girl, we leavin town oh-six-hundred. That’s A.M.”

  Too late. Dara was walking out with Idris.

  Xavier settled back, thinking, Now you worried about her goin out with an African pirate, after puttin up with Bosnian thugs and white supremacy assholes makin her pictures? She’s gonna shoot him in his Mercedes and fit it in someplace.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIRST DOCUMENTARY FILM Dara Barr shot on her own was called Women of Bosnia and it won an award at Cannes. Dara stayed on the women, no men in the picture identified, only the women after the men had used them.

  She made Whites Only intercutting neo-Nazi white supremacists with Klansmen wearing robes of different shades. It won Best Documentary at Sundance: skinheads and coneheads exposing their racism to Dara’s camera.

  She walked out of her studio on Chartres in the Quarter and shot Katrina ripping through New Orleans, flooding much of the city, and her two sisters, divorced, left town together for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her mother and dad, retired, living on St. Charles Avenue, thought of having their home repaired for the third time, sold the property and moved to Sea Island, Georgia. In the lull that followed the hurricane Dara’s camera stayed on people who couldn’t leave, homeless now, waiting for help that never came. Dara said she shot Katrina because there it was, outside. It won an Oscar.

  The awards came during her first ten years making factual films, showing people’s lives, getting them to talk about who they were. Dara was thirty-five at the time she began thinking about her next one.

  Nuns? She found them in a convent, sisters who had taught her in grade school, a gathering of Brides of Christ, pressing their rosaries through withered fingers. Some still wore their habits. Not one Audrey Hepburn among them.

  Try the other direction: a call girl talking about love for sale as she dresses to meet a john at one of the better hotels. She moves around the bedroom with her exposed breasts beginning to sag, telling Dara, “What do I do after, run a house? In New York it’s a three-bedroom apartment on the West Side. Sit in the living room talking to the john waiting for the high-energy black girl. He’s looking at Playboy. I was in Playboy when I was eighteen, before you had to shave your cooze and come off looking like a fucking statue. Is that what you want to make, a movie about me bitching?”

  An idea came along from a guy who sold restaurant supplies in a town devoted to restaurants. Gerard, a nasty drunk before he found his Higher Power in AA and cleaned himself up. Gerard’s idea—he’d even finance it—shoot AA meetings, the drunkalogues, a man or woman standing in the front of the room telling about harrowing situations inspired by booze. “I look up, I’m driving into traffic coming at me on the freeway, fast, nine o’clock Friday evening.”

  Dara had doubts, but listened to stories at meetings, heard recovering alcoholics being contrite, heard others tell their drunkalogues like they were doing stand-up. “I go out to wash the car, I’m in my bathing suit, and I come in the house smashed.” One after another. “In two years I had three DUIs and did thirty days for driving without a license.”

  “Everything is told,” Dara said. “These people are telling the film instead of showing it. They’re doing monologues. Albert Maysles knew how to set a mood. He was seventy-eight when he made In Transit, got passengers on a train talking about intimate moments in their lives. But while they’re telling, they’re showing who they are. He got as close to his subjects as possible and seldom asked a question, never ever foreground himself in his scenes.”

  Gerard said, “So you don’t want to shoot drunkalogues.”

  Dara became fixed on the pirates reading a three-column headline in the Times-Picayune:

  SOMALI PIRATES ARE

  HEROES TO VILLAGERS

  She read the piece that began: “Somalia’s increasingly brazen pirates are building sprawling stone houses, cruising in luxury cars—even hiring caterers to prepare Western-style food for the hostages.”

  Down to: “In northern coastal towns the pirate economy is thriving thanks to the money pouring in from ransomed ships, which has reached thirty million so far this year.”

  Dara pulled stories off the Internet and read about Somali pirates for the next few hours, accounts of what they were up to, some stories with photographs:

  The Saudi oil tanker carrying a hundred million dollars of crude, hijacked, boarded by pirates in less than fifteen minutes.

  The MV Faina, a Ukrainian cargo ship, being held for ransom since September, thirty-three Russian tanks and assault rifles aboard.

  Photographs of Somali speedboats skimming over the water with six or seven pirates aboard, each boat armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

  Another photo, a trawler and its crew of Somalis wearing casually wrapped kaffiyehs and T-shirts, and a sign on the trawler’s wheelhouse that read SOMALI COAST GUARD.

  She began to realize these guys were doing their own style of piracy, nothing like the old-time cutthroats. The Somalis were having a good time getting rich. She thought of Xavier who lived around the corner on St. Philip, and phoned him.

  Xavier’s voice came on asking Dara, “What you up to this hour?”

  She said, “You’ve been through the Gulf of Aden, haven’t you?”

  XAVIER LEBO, SIX-SIX STRAIGHT up in his bare feet, seventy-two years old, a black man with a gold ring in his ear, some gray in his hair and white teeth he showed smiling at Dara. Xavier had gone to sea when he was sixteen. He told Dara he’d been through the Gulf of Aden thirty, forty times counting both ways. He said, “You know how many ships pass through?”

  “All I’m sure of,” Dara said, “it’s on the east coast of Africa.”

  “Twenty thousand merchant ships and oil tankers a year,” Xavier said. “The ones headin west go up through the Red Sea to Suez, where the Egyptians try to shake you down. The other way you go all the way to China. You interested in the pirates, huh, rippin off all the ships go by.”

  “I wouldn’t mind talking to some of them.”

  “They gone after a hundred ships and caught maybe forty of ’em. Take money from the safe and what they want from the galley. Or they run the ship down to Eyl and hold it there for ransom. Ask a couple million for a Greek cargo ship and get it. You know what they want for the Sirius Star, the Saudi oil tanker? Twenty-five million. The Saudis say they won’t give ’em shit. All right, they’ll take seventeen million. They’ll get some- thin and buy new cars. You know what their favorite is? Black Toyota SUV with black windows. I hear some of the pirates are dressin up. They put on a suit and tie, drive up to Djibouti to get laid and marry a fine-lookin woman. Be his Djibouti wife.”

  Dara heard him flick his Ronson to light a cigarette.

  “You know where to find the best-lookin girls in Africa? Eritrea, on the Red Sea, above Ethiopia. But now I think about it, they some fine-lookin Ethiopian women I’ve seen. Smart-lookin thin ladies with the cheekbones, some black as coal, their race not tampered with much through the ages.” He said, “Hang on a minute, I got to take a leak, relieve my worn-out bladder.”

  He came back on and Dara said, “I’m thinking about doing one on the pirates. Interview some of them…Does that make sense?”

  Xavier said, “Yeah, but they take one look at you, gonna hold you for ransom.”

  “Really?” Dara said. “What do you think I’d be worth?”

  THEY MET THE FIRST time two days before Katrina, knowing it was coming, Dara waiting for a table at Felix’s, the manager telling her, “Just a few minutes, Dara.”

  Xavier got up from his table and waved her over.

  “Come on sit here. They lyin to you, ‘just a few minutes.’” He pulled out a chair at his table, a dozen oysters and a bottle of beer waiting. “You don’t mind, I like to ask you about a movie you made.” He started to smile a little. “The one you called Whites Only? You surprise me. Nice-lookin woman associatin with those freaks. They try and mess with you?”

  “At first,” Dara said, seate
d now with Xavier. “I told them I’m too busy to fall in love, okay? I asked what they’ve got against African Americans. Got them saying nasty things and started shooting.”

  “Shoulda used a shotgun.”

  Dara had a dozen oysters, then another while Xavier was on his third plate, Xavier telling her he’d been going to sea on and off most of fifty years. “Me and three hundred thousand Filipinos. I don’t know where they go. I always come back to New Orleans.”

  They had a couple of cognacs and coffee after.

  “You gonna shoot the hurricane’s on its way?”

  “I may as well.”

  “Bringin the Gulf of Mexico up the river. You gonna need a tall man to hump equipment, keep it dry.”

  “And a second cameraman,” Dara said.

  By the time they were shooting what was left of the Ninth Ward, Xavier was aiming a shoulder-mounted Sony at people sitting on top their homes, Xavier seeing their despair and hoping to catch it on film. Later on he sat in on the editing of these scenes and watched Dara give it her touch, eliminating his smash close-up of a woman’s face to treat her more gently, the woman on her roof holding a child. Xavier would look at Dara’s cut and see what it was like to be that woman.

  He went to Hollywood with Dara for the Oscar show.

  She even brought him onstage to stand next to her in his tux Dara borrowed from one of the Lakers, Xavier looking down at the top of her blond hair, done to slant across the corner of her eye. He thought Dara looked like a movie star. Even had on makeup. Dara in a black gown pasted on her slim body. She looked to Xavier like she was supposed to look. It seemed natural to her, like the hot chick was inside the documentary film shooter waiting to make her move. She held up Oscar, raised him over her head as she thanked her sponsors. Then brought Oscar down and thanked her cameraman Xavier LeBo, saying his name in a slow way as she looked up at him. “Xavier kept talking to me, asking if I was quick enough to shoot a hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour hurricane going by.” Dara said, holding up Oscar again, “Xavier deserves some of this award.”