The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  “Patron,” the wrestler called.

  Don Luis gave a quick look over his shoulder. “Do you know the poet Byron, Mr. Lander?” he said.

  “Not personally,” Wilson said. “I read him in college.”

  Don Luis pulled a heavy volume off the shelf and descended carefully, one rung at a time. “Byron was such a passionate writer, don’t you think?”

  “That’s what they say,” Wilson said. “Supposedly he slept with every man, woman, and child in Europe below the age of fifty.”

  Don Luis frowned. “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I’m talking about the poems.” He crossed to a library table strewn with books, pulled up a wing-backed easy chair, and sat down, volume of Byron in his lap like a cat.

  Wilson shrugged. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was dull,” he said. “They made us read it in college. Don Juan was a little better. I prefer Keats.”

  “Keats was sentimental and weak,” Don Luis said. “Think of all those whining letters to Fanny Brown,” then he pointed to a stool at his feet. “Sit down.”

  Wilson shook his head. “I’ll stand,” he said.

  Don Luis fingered his small mustache and looked up at Wilson through weary eyes. It was impossible to know what was going on behind that aristocratic poker face. Not knowing made Wilson uneasy.

  “Say what you will about Byron.” Don Luis tapped the volume with his thin, elegant fingers. “But his life lived up to his poems. He was heroic, a man of action in the best sense. An aristocrat. His poetry reflects his life, and so it’s better suited to our times than the paler work of more contemplative poets.”

  Wilson made an ambivalent gesture that Don Luis interpreted as skepticism. He sat forward in the chair, eyes bright at the prospect of an argument.

  “Look around, Mr. Lander, we are entering a new era in the history of the world,” he said, assuming a lecturing tone. “Men have grown tired of the rule of law. The seas are alive again with pirates. At last we are leaving behind the petty, the bourgeois, the comfortable. Leaving the age of corporate man and entering an age of wolves. Physical heroism and brute force will become the virtues of the future. Personal honor, and I mean the honor of the warrior, will replace all the lies of international commercial culture. Look at your own country! The dominant classes are morally bankrupt, too self-absorbed even to reproduce themselves. They value luxury more than power, safety more than their own souls. What have they wrought in the absence of honor? Suburbia! A place without texture in which all originalities of character are suppressed by tranquilizing drugs, where blandness is deemed the greatest good, where a man’s highest aspiration is to become a lawyer or a marketing consultant. You Americans have become a soft nasty people, a people who want neither terror nor virtue. Thank God all that is changing now. Your decaying cities are breeding a new race of assassins whose hands will never tire of reaching for the sword. One day soon they will rise up and slit your throats while you sleep. Well then …”

  “Wait a minute, Luis,” Wilson interrupted. “Forget the philosophizing and the Romantic poets. You intend to kill me, right?” and he slumped down on the stool, exhausted suddenly, and put his elbows on the table. “How are you going to do it?”

  “I’ll probably have Alfonso snap your neck,” Don Luis said after a moment’s consideration. “It’s really the quickest way, with the least fuss and mess. Relax and it’s over in seconds.”

  Wilson shot a glance at the massive wrestler, once again engrossed in his biography of Bismarck, and already felt the man’s meaty fingers crushing his windpipe. Wilson went dizzy suddenly and leaned his forehead against the library table. For a whole minute, he stared down at the worn marble of the floor, at the Portugee’s quilted yellow slippers. When he lifted his head back up again, Don Luis was waiting, fingertips pressed together.

  “Before you kill me,” Wilson said in a voice as calm as he could make it, “let me tell you a story about my father.”

  Don Luis smiled patiently. He had all the time in the world.

  “During World War Two, my father served with the U.S. Army Air Corps stationed out of Lancaster Field in England,” Wilson said. “They ran bombing runs to France and Germany in those big planes, you know, B-17’s, the Flying Fortresses. My father was the radio operator, but many of the missions he flew went out under radio silence, so most of the time he just sat there in the belly of the plane, waiting for the flak to rip open the fuselage. They went up four and five times a week, the odds were terrible, something like ninety percent of the airmen were hit. In the last six months of 1943 the Allies lost more than ten thousand men in the sky over Europe. The more you went up, the worse your odds of surviving. But if you survived twenty-five missions, they would rotate you out. That was the magic number.

  “My father survived his twenty-five missions without a scratch, but he didn’t want to be rotated out. Instead he asked for a transfer to a new plane for twenty-five more missions. They never had enough experienced men on hand, so he got the twenty-five missions he asked for, and the next twenty-five. He ended up flying more missions than any other radio operator in the Army Air Corps during World War Two. Everybody thought he was crazy. He wasn’t crazy; he was a gambler who knew he was better than the odds.

  “Before the war he had been a law student at Ashland College, someone who had never gambled in his whole life, never touched a pack of cards. He became a gambler after his very first mission in the air over Europe. It was a famous air disaster; it’s in the history books. A whole squadron went up without support to bomb a munitions factory and ran into a nest of German fighters. Out of fifty-seven planes, only one came back—his. Wasn’t even touched, not a single bullet hole. After that they changed the plane’s name from something stupid and patriotic, like the Winged Victory, to the Lucky Linda and painted a big happy naked girl on the side. Father figured he had already cheated the worst odds of all on his very first mission, so why couldn’t he do it again and again? He loved cheating the odds. He told me once that cheating the odds was the only thing that makes us human beings. There was no real skill, no art involved, he said—it was all style.

  “So when he was discharged in 1945, he became a professional gambler. He loved the horses most of all, but he would play roulette, poker, shoot craps, anything but the dogs. He figured the odds were always against him, they always were, and he always won. And you know what, Luis? I’m the same way. I spent half my life denying it, trying to live very cautiously, trying to build up a wall of probability between myself and the unknown. Now I know the truth. Like my father, I’m a gambler and a damned good one. Like my father, I can’t be beat at any game of chance where the odds are against me. Not by anyone alive.”

  Don Luis was silent after Wilson finished speaking. Then he rose and went over to the window and looked out at the garden and the rain.

  “The stakes,” he said at last. “What do you have to offer besides your life?”

  “It’s Cricket,” Wilson said. “If you win, she’ll marry you next week, no questions asked.”

  “If I lose?”

  Wilson shrugged. “She says she loves me.”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “I don’t know. But killing me right now won’t do any good. She won’t marry you with my blood on your hands. She wanted me to tell you that.”

  Don Luis did not turn from the window.

  Wilson waited an interminable minute. He opened the volume of Byron and saw this line from Manfred: “Accursed! What have I to do with days? They are too long already …” Then he closed it again.

  15

  They had high tea at five in the afternoon. The housekeeper brought out focaccia bread and finger sandwiches and a pot of spiced hot tisane, followed by a tray of sweets. When she cleared this away a half hour later, the Killa from Manila took all the books from the library table and brought out two chairs and a strongbox. He opened the lid, and Wilson couldn’t help a gasp. It was full of gold Krugerrands. Alive with their own light, the
y looked like every picture of pirate treasure he had ever seen.

  Don Luis drew out a handful and scattered them across the table. Wilson took one between his fingertips. The obverse showed a bust of F. W. Botha, Champion of Apartheid; the reverse showed an innocent springbok gamboling on the veldt.

  “Rather gaudy, don’t you think?” Don Luis said. “But they’re handy to gamble with. So much more impressive than poker chips.”

  They divided the Krugerrands into equal piles of one thousand and began with stud poker, nothing wild. Every few hands Don Luis would open a fresh pack, which he removed from a Renaissance cabinet across the room. Later in the evening the housekeeper brought a platter of cold meats and cheeses, followed by cigars and shots of mango liqueur made from fruit grown on the estate. After that, they smoked and played and spoke little. There were no stars out the diamond-pane windows, just rain and jungle black. At the end of six hours, Wilson was five hundred Krugerrands up. Two hours later he was fifty down. But he was never worried. The odds sang to him, and he felt the truth quite simply: Don Luis was a man he could beat.

  As dawn showed the first stroke in the sky, Wilson took the Portugee’s last coin. They were piled up at Wilson’s elbow’s now, like gold in a fairy tale. At any moment he expected them to turn into lumps of coal.

  Don Luis leaned back, a distant wisdom in his gaze. Wilson stretched; he heard the bones of his vertebrae crackle like popcorn.

  “Now I have to decide whether to kill you or to let you get away with my woman,” Don Luis said.

  Wilson shrugged. His eyes hurt from lack of sleep, but he didn’t feel tired. “You are a gentleman,” he said. “I assume your word is worth something.”

  “Unfortunately it is,” Don Luis said.

  They got up from the table and went downstairs to the kitchen, a large room with rough stone walls and slit windows. Huge impractical copper pots hung on pegs beside a fireplace big enough to roast a horse. Above the mantel, a dusty leather shield showed a falcon and two stars on a yellow ground.

  “This is the oldest part of the house,” Don Luis said. “Built around 1500. Look at the hand-hewn beams in the ceiling.”

  Wilson glanced up at the beams, which seemed unremarkable. He took a stool along the counter to the left of the sink and waited as Don Luis rummaged in the pantry.

  “I must confess a liking for the hearty American breakfast,” Don Luis called. “But I don’t come down here very often. It will take me a moment to find the right ingredients.” He emerged a few minutes later with the eggs, coffee, bread, a half wheel of Gruyère, and a slab of country bacon.

  “Need any help?” Wilson said. “I was assistant cook aboard the Compound Interest.”

  “You were a galley scullion, Mr. Lander?” the Portugee said, and raised an eyebrow.

  “Assistant cook,” Wilson said.

  “Good. I will leave it to you.”

  Wilson boiled the coffee African style and sliced the cheese and bacon and beat the eggs for the omelets and set them to fry in olive oil on the big steel range.

  When the food was ready, they sat at the counter to eat. The bread was fresh and the country bacon had a sharp, smoky taste and the coffee was fine and strong. Wilson thought he had never eaten a better meal. They finished in silence and sat brooding over their coffee afterward. From somewhere in the villa came the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

  “The story about your father and World War Two, was it true?” Don Luis said after a while.

  “No,” Wilson said.

  “You were right, Mr. Lander,” Don Luis said. “You are a good gambler.”

  “So are you,” Wilson said.

  The Portugee waved a hand. “But I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “You mean with Cricket?”

  “None other. I was a married man once, with three beautiful children, two boys and a girl. I have not seen them in years. They live in Paris with their mother, where they are good little leftists, studying at the Sorbonne. I don’t mind telling you that I am now of an age where the comforts of family life begin to seem very appealing. But their mother has taught my children to hate me. She has enough money of her own and wants nothing to do with me. All this land, all this tradition—and the Hidalgos de la Vaca can be traced back more than a thousand years—will end when I die. I threw the future away for Susan Page.”

  “How did you do that?” Wilson said.

  “In the usual way.” Don Luis shrugged. “Many years ago I went every spring to the Palmettos to play cards and stayed often at the home of Susan’s mother. Susan was a beautiful young child in those days, very mature for her age. I remember the first incident quite well. One night after the gambling, she came into my bedroom and lifted up her nightdress to show me her new breasts. My God, she was probably no more than twelve years old, and her skin was pure white. That time I resisted her, it was easy, she was so young—but it was not so easy the next time. She was fifteen, a flower in bloom, a beauty, and she was waiting naked in my bed. I should have sent her packing, but”—Don Luis shook his head sadly—“such forbearance would take a better man than myself. In a few moments, everything—my children, my wife, my honor—turned to dust. I have wasted many years of my life on Susan Page. I won her from her father with a pair of treys, took her to sea. I educated her. I taught her everything I know—about the sea, about life, about books. I even sent her to university. It was all a terrible mistake. She has grown tired of me, and all she wants to do now is get away. I am half glad you are removing her from my life for good.”

  Wilson put down his coffee cup, a large European-style breakfast bowl without handles. The last of it tasted sharp and bitter on his tongue. “That’s not how Cricket tells the story,” Wilson said quietly. “Her version is exactly the opposite. She said that you raped her, then forced her into a kind of sexual slavery.”

  “Of course,” Don Luis said, “perfect!” and he started to say something else, but he covered his eyes with his hand and began to laugh.

  Wilson was unnerved by the sound of it, a weird metallic ringing in the empty kitchen.

  16

  Cricket lay in the rain on the patio, naked except for a pair of socks and very high on something that smelled like burnt oranges. Her hair scrawled wet snakes to her shoulders; her socks hung from her feet like sodden rags. Wilson knelt and took her hand, cold and wet in his own. Her pupils were dilated; she didn’t seem to recognize him. He had a hard time keeping his eyes off the coppery hair between her legs, and his ears burned at the thought of it.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “We’ll get you dry and into bed.”

  Cricket made an incoherent gurgling noise and had to be hefted into her bedroom like a bagful of dirty laundry.

  An hour later she had come down enough to speak in quick, gasping sentences.

  “You’re alive,” she seemed incredulous. “You beat the odds. You beat the Portugee.”

  “I did,” Wilson said, and he couldn’t suppress a little smile. Then he held up a jar of sticky, orange-smelling black paste that he had found on the dining room table.

  “What is this shit?”

  Cricket lay damp and feeble in the bed, sheet tucked up to her chin. Wilson had to repeat his question.

  “Opium,” she said at last.

  “Where’s the pipe?” Wilson said.

  Cricket shook her head. “No pipe,” she said. “Ate it. On crackers.

  “You ate it?” Wilson said, and in response she rolled over and vomited off the other side of the bed. He went to the bathroom to get the wastebasket and a wet facecloth. When he came back, he gently washed Cricket’s face and put the wastebasket by the bed and pulled up a chair. He was afraid to leave her alone in this condition.

  “Said they got you,” Cricket said in a gasp. “Dad … he said—”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Wilson said. “Here I am, in the flesh.”

  “—you were dead,” she said, not hearing. “That the Portugee cut yo
ur head off, like they did to my poor Webster. Poor, poor old Webster. Cut his head off and stuck it up on a pole in the middle of town.”

  “Who’s Webster?” Wilson said. His rain-damp shirt felt like a cold hand on his back.

  Cricket made a wobbly movement on the pillow with her head. “Webster—he was my last lover. I really dug Webster. Handsome dude. Muscles like an ox. But stupid. Not like you. Thought he could beat them at their game. They cut off his head. He was hard to love without a head—”

  “That’s enough,” Wilson said.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Cricket said, and she leaned over the wastebasket with Wilson’s help and vomited up a mouthful of evil-smelling black goop.

  “Shit,” Wilson said when she came up, gasping. “You’re a mess.”

  “It’s the opium,” Cricket said. “I ate too much of it. I think I’ll be O.K. now.”

  Wilson wiped her face, and she leaned back against the pillow. She appeared to sleep for a few minutes; then her eyes snapped open with a suddenness that he found startling. She sounded quite sober when she spoke; only her crazy eyes gave her away.

  “… understand how lonely I am without you,” she said as if resuming a conversation that had been going on in her head. “Not like Webster. He was funny, and I liked him in bed, but afterward there was this cold wind blowing over our bodies. Dad and the Portugee, they always taught me to be hard—a regular pirate’s daughter. With you, Wilson, I forget about that, become a human being. See, your life has got to be a part of mine. Got to. We just jump over the broom, that’s all. Pirate marriage, just jump over the broom like the slaves.”

  Wilson looked down at her face, puffy and greenish against the white pillow. Her eyes were red-rimmed and muddied by the opium, her cheeks pricked out with tiny purple spots from the effort of the vomiting. Still, he felt an odd tug at his heart.

  “There’s still too much I don’t know about you,” he said gently. “You haven’t been straight with me. Every time we talk it’s a different story. The truth is always somewhere off the port bow, floundering in deep water, so to speak. We set our sails for it but never quite get there, do we?”