“I don’t know what to do with this, sir,” Wilson said. The shotgun felt thick and ugly in his grasp.
“It’s a shotgun,” the captain said. “You point in the general direction and shoot.”
Nothing in Wilson’s life had prepared him for the shock of what he saw when he turned back starboard. The approaching vessel had raised its colors, a black flag bearing a white skull and crossbones, flanked on one side by a horned demon drinking a bottle of rum and on the other by a bare-breasted mermaid holding a dagger in her hand.
“Ha! There’s all the answers you need,” the captain said. “That black flag means no quarter. We’re all dead men.”
“They’re kidding,” Wilson said, his voice wavering. “That sort of thing is out of fashion these days, right?”
“Last year there were one thousand and thirteen acts of piracy on the high seas, my friend,” the captain said grimly. “Call Lloyd’s of London; it’s a matter of public record. But someone here’s got a sense of humor or at least a sense of history. I’ve seen that flag before in old books. It was the ensign of an infamous pirate clan from the golden age of piracy. Captain Elzevir Montague was the worst of them. He sacked Portobello with Morgan. They passed the dirty trade down from father to son for more than two hundred years. Did a little bit of slaving, you know, a little wrecking. But killing innocent people on the high seas was their favorite occupation. Terrorized the shipping lanes from the Spanish Main to Madagascar until the British Navy finally put a stop to the whole bloody crew in 1805. Wiped out their home base, a group of obscure islands in the Gulf of Mexico not too far from the mouth of the Mississippi.”
Wilson felt a cold hand on his heart. The pirate ship was not more than a hundred yards off now. He could see the rusty eyes, the cannon gleaming, the murderous black flag flying in the wind.
These last moments were strangely calm.
“Do you remember the name of the islands?” Wilson heard himself say.
The captain thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “The Palmetto Keys.”
8
Soon the pirate ship was alongside. The rusty black hull rose up like the side of a cliff. But it seemed deserted, a ghost ship. Not a single face showed above the rail. The captain took the bullhorn from the small arms closet.
“I’ve got your man here,” he shouted through the speaker. “The cook. Make a move and I blow his head off!”
In the wake of this crackling announcement, silence.
The captain dropped the bullhorn, picked up the Mauser carbine, and raked the side with gunfire. The sharp metallic explosions rang nastily inside Wilson’s head. He dropped to the deck and put his fingers in his ears. It was a natural reaction that did not feel cowardly. Then, the firing stopped abruptly, and he looked up.
Cricket stood holding a nickel-plated .38 revolver to the captain’s left occipital bone.
The captain tensed his finger on the trigger of the carbine. For a moment, it was not possible to say what would happen next. Then, his shoulders sagged, and he dropped the gun clattering to the deck.
Cricket shifted on her haunches. “Get some handcuffs,” she called to Wilson.
All Wilson could do was stare.
“Get some fucking handcuffs!”
Wilson took a pair of plastic handcuffs from the small arms closet. Then he shook his head and dropped them back inside.
“This just isn’t right,” he said.
Cricket’s jaw tightened. Her forehead seemed to bulge. “If you don’t cuff the man,” she hissed, “I’ll have to kill him.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Wilson said. He felt the sweat rolling down his face; he blinked sweat from his eyes.
“Captain?” Cricket said, and cocked the hammer.
“You heard the lady, mister,” the captain said.
Wilson took up the cuffs again and locked them around the captain’s wrists.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“You traitorous little bitch,” the captain said to Cricket.
“Shut up, old man,” Cricket said.
Wilson stood back and held up his hands. “Whatever you’ve got going here, it’s not for me.”
Cricket swung around, her eyes blank and steely. “Too late for remorse now,” she said.
9
The pirates took control of the Compound Interest in less than two minutes. Wilson watched, helpless, as thirty brown men swung over the side. A few actually had knives between their teeth. Most were Africans, their faces marked with tribal scars, but Wilson saw a few red-turbaned Malays, a handful of South American types, and an Asian or two.
Ackerman was hauled out of his office and tied with nylon cord to the forward mast. “I was in the middle of a very important conference call,” he said, “corn prices—” but they bashed the thick glasses off his face with the butt of a rifle before he could finish.
A moment later two Africans came up behind Wilson and knocked him down. They pushed his face into the deck, snapped plastic bands tight around his wrists. He had been seduced away from his quiet life in the city for this final moment of irony. What would Andrea say if she could see him now? It was a ridiculous thought. Didn’t these people kill everyone so as to leave no witnesses? The dread took a knowing bite out of the inside of his stomach.
The leader of the boarding party was a tall, narrow-faced African wearing an oil-smeared pair of gabardine dress slacks cut off at the knees. His bare chest was crisscrossed with a complicated pattern of raised scars, and he carried a leather quirt wrapped with silver wire that seemed to be a badge of office. His men in place, he approached Cricket with a respectful gesture and said a few words in a language that Wilson could not understand.
“O.K., Mustapha. Good job,” Cricket said in English when the man was done. “It’s good to see you again.” Then she picked up the bullhorn. “Ahoy aboard the Storm Car,” she called. “This is the all clear. Prepare to come aboard.”
A chain ladder lowered over the side with a loud rattling noise. Two men descended. The first was a youngish fellow with a helmet of Germanic blond hair, wearing an expensive-looking plaid blazer, creased khakis, and new leather boat shoes. A notebook computer in a clear waterproof carrying case hung from one shoulder. Wilson heard the man’s shoes squeak as they touched the deck. He was tall and nicely proportioned, with the earnest Aryan type face that appeared on Nazi propaganda posters of the thirties. He blinked his pale blue eyes at the glare for a moment, then stood aside for his companion.
The second man was of a different type entirely: a short, bowlegged, scruffy gnome in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He wore his thong sandals with white socks, Japanese style. His pockets bulged with bits of rope and other odds and ends. A rectangle of duct tape crept halfway up one leg of his baggy shorts. His shirt lay open, revealing a half dozen barbaric gold chains hidden like snakes in grizzled chest hair.
This man’s face looked familiar to Wilson: the strong jaw, the Roman nose, the lines of determination around the mouth. A windblown tangle of thinning coppery hair sat atop his head like a coonskin cap. A black eye patch covered one eye. The other eye, large and malevolent, studied the three prisoners slumped together now beneath the mast. When he had seen what he wanted to see, he smiled the smile of the Devil surveying the sorrows of mankind. Wilson felt a chill to the bone and looked away.
For a moment the deck was quiet. He could hear the sound of the wind, and porpoises gamboling oblivious off the bow, and the grating of the two hulls scraping together. And a loud thumping sound that was the beating of his own heart.
Cricket stuck the .38 in the waistband of her jeans and went over to embrace the little man. The top of his head barely reached her breasts. “Dad,” she said.
“How’s my big girl?” the man said, and patted her on the ass.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But it was a little touch and go there for a minute. The old bastard caught Noog doing his thing to the engines.”
“When this is over, we’ll go o
n vacation, honey,” the man said soothingly. “Where do you want to go?”
Cricket thought for a minute, raised an eyebrow to the blue sky, insouciant as a coed. “Oh, Paris, I guess,” she said. “I could do a little shopping.”
“That’s a date,” he said, then he rubbed his hands together. “Now, where’s our prize turkey?”
Wilson shot a glance at Ackerman. The billionaire trembled violently in the hot sun, his face white with fear. The shadow of the mast fell like a great weight across his shoulder. Tears slid down his cheeks into the collar of the foolish pink shirt he wore.
The pirate who was Cricket’s father approached and stood, hands on his hips, staring down. Ackerman fixed his myopic eyes on the polished planking of the deck and would not look up. At last the pirate prodded him with one white stockinged toe.
“You Ackerman?”
The billionaire blinked painfully, the side of his face sore and bruised. “No,” he said in a small, miserable voice. “Could I have my glasses back?”
“I wanted to congratulate you on that Caltech Industries takeover three years ago,” the pirate said. “Fastest, meanest leveraged buyout I ever saw. Damned elegant. Stockholders never knew what hit them.”
“You heard about that?” Ackerman said, surprised.
“It was in all the financial papers. The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times of London. Both had good in-depth articles on your maneuverings.”
“Who are you?” Ackerman said.
“I’m Captain Page, in command of the good ship you see yonder,” the man said, and nodded over his shoulder at the rusty vessel looming behind. “Member in good standing of the Brotherhood of the Coast. That’s all you need to know.”
“You’re a p-pirate?” Ackerman stuttered.
The pirate shrugged. “You see the eye patch, don’t you?”
“Is it real?” Ackerman said.
“Lost the eye in a household accident,” the pirate said. “A drill bit snapped and went right through my cornea. Then the thing got a nasty infection and had to come out. Could have gotten a glass one, but what the hell. Guess you could say I’m a traditionalist as far as my work is concerned.”
“You’re a goddamned murderous thief,” Captain Amundsen spit out suddenly, “a robber who kills innocent people. Tell him what that black flag means. Tell him what you plan to do with us when you’ve got what you want.”
“What are you going to do?” Ackerman cried out, hysteria in his voice. “I’ve got money, I’ll pay you. Please …” His words disappeared into a whine.
“We know you have money, Ackerman,” the pirate said quietly. “It’s just a question of how much.”
“That’s not fair,” Ackerman said, petulant as a child.
“What’s fair, Schlüber?” the pirate called over his shoulder.
The young man in the blazer approached, unshouldered his notebook computer, and snapped it out of the clear plastic case. Then he sat cross-legged on the deck, and Wilson heard the tiny click and whine of the computer’s hard drive coming up to speed.
“Give me a second, sir,” he said. “Got to call up the database.” He spoke the correct, faintly accented English common to most educated Germans. He peered at the screen with his pale blue eyes for a few seconds. The keys made demure clicking noises beneath his fingertips.
“Here he is,” he said at last. “Filed under rich bastards. Ackerman, Dwight A. Born San Luis Obispo, California, April seventeenth, 1946. Paid federal income tax last year on income and assets totaling just over one and a half billion. Means he ought to be worth at least two billion more, sir. These bastards always have substantial amounts tucked away in banks in Switzerland or the Bahamas.”
Ackerman licked his lips. “That’s just not true,” he began, but Captain Page made an impatient gesture, and Mustapha came forward and clubbed Ackerman on the back of the neck with the quirt. It made a sharp snapping sound, and the billionaire slumped forward into the nylon rope.
Wilson turned his eyes to the white sky and tried not to see or hear any more. The pirate boarding party loitered in the background, smoking cigarettes and laughing like construction workers on a lunch break. The shadow of the forward mast inched across the deck.
10
Wilson was taken to the pirate ship and locked in a small, airless cabin on a deck below the waterline.
After a few minutes, the overhead bulb blew out, and he spent his time in stale blackness, curled up in the berth on a bare mattress that smelled like urine. A vent in the bulkhead admitted a faint grid of light. Small scuttling noises across the floor announced the presence of rats. Once someone brought him water and a candy bar; the door opened for a second, then closed again. According to his illuminated digital watch, one whole day passed, each hour, each minute, each second heavy as lead. He watched the tiny green screen as if it were a television set.
For a few of these dead hours, Wilson thought of his father. Most people associated gamblers with gangsters and thugs. Wilson’s father had been a quiet, kind man, the antithesis of the flashy racetrack tough guy. He still had a clear picture of his father’s face, and he could remember the harsh jangle of the phone the night of the wreck of the four forty-five and the sound of his mother’s anguished sobbing through the bedroom wall.
The cover of the next morning’s Dispatch had shown the crumpled passenger cars sticking out of the black, frozen waters of the Potswahnamee like the fingers of a skeletal hand. There had been a second photograph, in the Sunday edition of the Telegraph-Journal. This one was later awarded some sort of photojournalism prize that year, and Wilson had seen it since, reproduced in books: The corpses both burnt and frozen lined the riverbank stiff as firewood. Police and coastguardmen stood casually in the foreground in black coats wet with rain, talking about sports. From the toes of the dead, white tags fluttered in the wind like prayers.
Just a week before the disaster Wilson’s father had taken him out to Ardmore Downs on the old trolley. Now Wilson closed his eyes and saw the wide green oval, the bland suburbs stretching away beyond the fence. A few cold flamingos, their wings clipped, wandered the infield like lost dogs. It was a steeplechase—the horses went over the jumps, brush and log, and a few jockeys went down each race, tumbling across the turf beneath the hooves of the stragglers. He caught the smell of freshly cut grass and manure and pipe smoke. He saw the big flanks of the horses, the sour expressions on the faces of the gamblers when they lost, the big sedate homburg and fresh tweed jacket his father wore.
During the seventh race his father put a hand on Wilson’s shoulder and knelt down. A father-son outing must necessarily be accompanied by a father-son talk, and the man pushed his hat back with a sigh and gave it his best shot.
“I know you’ve heard your mother and me fight about money sometimes,” he said, then he paused and looked up as the horses thumped by in a cloud of sod, their bright silks flashing against the green. “She’s a fine woman and very smart, but sometimes she gets things mixed up. Your mother thinks people need money more than anything else, but that’s not exactly true. They need love, of course, but what they really need is dignity. Everybody needs dignity, and there’s not enough of the stuff to go around. And let me tell you a secret—dignity has no price. No man alive is rich enough to buy it.”
He went on to explain that the only dignity he found in life was in being a gambler, that there was beauty in the work because it was always just him and the odds. “Even when the numbers aren’t going my way, I don’t have to take crap from anybody,” he said. “Think of all the nine-to-fivers marching down into the subway like rats. They’re miserable. If someone says jump, they jump. They traded their dignity for better odds. Don’t ever do that, son. Promise me.”
Wilson promised solemnly, though he didn’t know at the time what he was promising, and a week later his father got on the four forty-five express to another racetrack and his odds gave out and the train went down into the black water and ice of the Potswahnamee.
<
br /> Now, curled up on a reeking mattress in the bowels of a pirate ship bound for points unknown, Wilson thought about the things his father had said, and he wondered how he would meet his end. Who could say what his father had felt in the last few seconds of life as the baggage flew loose and the passenger cars screamed off the trestle into oblivion? Is it possible to hold on to dignity in such a situation? Most likely the accident had happened too fast for him to feel anything but panic.
But this time, Wilson had time to prepare himself, a day in the dark to construct the artifice that he was not afraid, that life didn’t matter so much as how you left it.
11
The pirate sat at an old wooden table on the quarterdeck of the Storm Car, finishing a breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausages, and toast. A bottle of vodka stood half empty at his right hand. A black youth in a clean white jacket, napkin over one arm, hovered just behind with a glass pitcher of orange juice. The orange juice glowed an intolerable yellow in the bright, hot light of noon. The pirate wore a tattered red bathrobe hanging open over his chest, a pair of green boxer shorts, and green fuzzy slippers.
After the blackness of his prison in the hold, all this color and light gave Wilson a terrible headache.
Wilson and Captain Amundsen sprawled side by side handcuffed on the deck in the sun, waiting for the pirate to finish eating. Crates of ordnance packed in straw and lashed with canvas strapping made black tombstone-shaped shadows on the deck. The pirate ate slowly, reading a copy of the Financial Times, folding and refolding the onionskin pages carefully between each bite. Mustapha stood guarding the prisoners, leather quirt in hand, an automatic rifle slung over his scarred black shoulder.
During the day and a half since the attack, the Storm Car, with the Compound Interest in tow, had sailed to a different patch of sea. Now close off the port bow lay a jungle island. Its green tangle of vegetation straggled down to a rim of white beach, and Wilson could just make out parrots in the trees. In the distance, more islands, the channels between them clogged with reeds and saw grass. The humid air was thick with insects and the rank malarial smell of the tropics.
The Pirate's Daughter Page 13
