The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  Wilson hesitated. He didn’t like the look of the situation.

  “Why do we need these?” he said at last.

  The pirate frowned. “Because this country is a fucking snake pit,” he said. “Full of banditos and the like. Don’t be such a citizen. Choose your weapon.”

  Wilson peered into the bag. He saw an assault rifle, a few pistols, bayonets in greening scabbards. He took one of the bayonets, fixed it to his belt, and selected an ancient revolver in a leather holster. A torn bit of leather strapping dangled from a ring at the base of the grip.

  The pirate chuckled, took the revolver from Wilson’s hand, broke open the chamber, spun it around.

  “It figures,” he said. “An old eight-shot Webley-Vickers, World War One vintage. Check the holster.”

  Wilson turned the holster over. Scraped into the leather on the back was a short inscription: “Ubi Bene, Ibi Patria. Lt. J. F. Hooks, 12th Rgt. 2nd. Btln. Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Flanders, 1917.”

  Wilson read it out loud.

  The pirate nodded. “The dumbshit officers in those days used to go over the top with nothing more than that pistol and a whistle. For God and country and such shit. They got blown to bits. Perfect for you.”

  He handed it back and fished out a leather pouch of extra ammunition; then, armed and ready, the landing party marched up the slip toward a concrete blockhouse at the far end.

  A dozen or so soldiers of the Bupu militia dressed in ragged fatigues squatted around a fire in front of the blockhouse. Well-oiled assault rifles hung off their backs. Their mouths were stuffed with something that looked like dried tobacco, torn from a pile of greenish black leaves in a tattered cardboard shoe box being passed around. They stared into the fire and chewed and spit black juice at the burning scrap wood. As the landing party approached, one of the soldiers stood and leveled his weapon. The others didn’t bother to turn around. Captain Page gave his shotgun to Cricket and stepped into the light of the fire. After a brief exchange in Bupu and sign language, the pirate was led into the blockhouse. The rest of the landing party stood waiting uneasily in the shadows.

  Wilson heard a faint booming that was the artillery bombardment on the outskirts and the sput-sput sound of the men spitting.

  “What if our friend didn’t show up tonight?” Schlüber whispered.

  “Then they kill us,” Nguyen said out loud, “and our problems over.”

  Mustapha grinned at this in the darkness.

  “Comforting thought,” Schlüber said.

  “So what is that shit?” Wilson said.

  “What shit?” Cricket said.

  “The soldiers,” Wilson said. “What are they chewing?”

  “Like a bunch of bloody cows having a go at their cuds, if you ask me,” Schlüber said.

  “Kaf,” Mustapha said. “Makes you talk to God.”

  “That shit’s one of the reasons why things are so fucked up here,” Cricket said. “It’s a narcotic weed, wouldn’t be so dangerous in tea. I’ve had kaf tea, actually—a mild stimulant, something like an espresso with a shot of brandy. But these characters have been chewing kaf since about noon with nothing in their stomachs except maybe a bottle of tejiyaa. After about six hours of chewing you start to hallucinate. Most of the fighting here goes on at night, when everyone is totally out of their heads and seeing ghosts and demons coming at them out of the dark. At that point no one knows who they are shooting at, and no one cares.”

  Captain Page came out of the blockhouse fifteen minutes later with a young militia officer in a clean khaki uniform. The officer shook the captain’s hand and stepped over to say a few inaudible words to his men. A grumble went up, and there was more spitting. The officer reached down, snatched up the cardboard shoe box of kaf, held it over the fire, and screamed an order in a high, sharp voice. One of the soldiers rose with a heavy sigh and adjusted his assault rifle. Four others followed his lead, and this motley escort led the landing party up the slip through an opening in a wall of sandbags and into the dark night of Rigala.

  7

  Wilson saw vague streets full of craters, burned-out buses and cars, sidewalks clotted with rubble. A bunch of decomposing corpses were piled against a tumbledown wall, frozen in macabre-comic poses by the effects of rigor mortis. Rats scuttled everywhere. Telephone poles and streetlights had been knocked over to barricade the intersections.

  From what Wilson could tell in the darkness, this part of the city dated from the colonial era. It was a district that had once been full of wrought-iron balconies and pastel colonnades and terrace restaurants, like the kind he remembered from Buptown back home. Now the buildings were abandoned and broken. The city held the quiet of the tomb. Cats watched from the empty doorways, their yellow eyes glowing with detached curiosity. The soldiers did not speak. They loped alongside like wolves, the straps of their rifles making a faint leather-creaking noise.

  “This used to be such a beautiful city,” Cricket said in a low voice. “Now it’s mostly depopulated. Everyone is dead or living in the bush or gone across to wallow like pigs at Quatre Sables.”

  The soldiers led them along a narrow alley between the remains of two large buildings piled up like a mess of Legos, across a vacant lot, and up a hill into the residential sector. Here they followed a broad avenue through a park in which all the palm trees had been burned to black sticks. In the middle of the park on a bullet-scarred pedestal stood an impressively large statue of an African man wearing a 1960s-era three-button suit. In one hand he held an open book; in another, a native ashtzisi, the staff of carved wood and buffalo horn that was the badge of a Bupu chief. He was probably sixty feet high and twenty feet broad at the shoulders. A small chunk of his nose was missing, and bullet holes pocked his jacket, but otherwise he seemed intact.

  “That’s President Sequhue,” the pirate said over his shoulder, his voice ringing hollow in the empty city. At the name one of the soldiers shot over a hostile look, but the pirate continued. “In 1960 Sequhue worked out the terms of independence with the U.K. They called him the Bupandan Gandhi. He was a short little guy, wrote poetry, studied at Cambridge in the thirties. From about 1961 to ’75, they had a sort of golden age here in Bupanda, mostly because of Sequhue’s progressive policies. In those days it was a prosperous country, very Western in outlook.

  “Then Sequhue got sick with spinal meningitis and experienced some sort of mystical revelation and decided all at once the Western influence had to go He outlawed capitalism and due process, beer, the wearing of pants and shirts, the use of zippers—people were shot for using zippers—he kicked out all foreign nationals, gained about two hundred pounds, and took a harem of something like a thousand wives. Then he outlawed Christianity and tried to revive the old animistic religions. They say there were human sacrifices right here in the medina. The civil war started up soon after that. Unfortunately all those bad old Western ideas about the rights of the individual were the only thing keeping the Bupus and Andas from each other’s throats. Soon they reverted to the same old crap, the slaughter and slavery they’d practiced for a millennium before the British came in the 1870s.

  “Sequhue wasn’t mad, understand? Just an idealist. They’re the worst kind. He decided the Western model promoted selfish materialism and personal corruption and at the same time didn’t make people happy. ‘Look at New York, look at London,’ he said in a famous speech. ‘Go there and find me one good, happy man!’ Hell, I guess the old bastard had a point. But it was just the thing this country didn’t need. Millions died in the civil war, and there’s still no end in sight. I’m not complaining. It’s great for business.”

  “Where’s Sequhue now?” Wilson said, and was surprised at the reedy echo of his voice in the empty park.

  “He was murdered during an orgy at the presidential palace about fifteen years ago,” the pirate said. “She was an Anda prostitute, and he was doing something unspeakable to her when it happened, but both sides still look up to Sequhue as some kind of martyred saint. Ju
st goes to show, objective reality has no bearing on what people believe in the end.”

  The landing party crossed the park at a trot and turned left onto another broad street, once lined with date palms and grand old houses with verandas and rose gardens. The date palms looked sick and stunted; the grand old houses and their gardens lay in ruins. Halfway down the second block from the park, a battered white mansion showed signs of life. Slashes of yellow light shone from busted-out windows closed off with sandbags. Barbed wire and guard posts encircled a dusty acre that had once sprouted roses and tulips and daffodils.

  They were led past the main guard post and up wide front steps crowded with sleeping soldiers and into the house. Wilson caught the rap of automatic weapons fire in the distance. They came through rooms heaped with broken furniture and strewn with soiled, discarded documents and entered a large ballroom, lit with parlor lamps missing shades. Broken couches and a few dozen chairs sat at odd angles to one another. In one corner a smashed grand piano rested on its two front legs like a dog sitting. Militia officers lounged about chewing kaf and drinking tejiyaa. A few lay passed out on the floor in puddles of urine. The rise and fall of male voices filled the room.

  An African the size of Frankenstein’s monster sprawled across a yellow velvet couch at the back. He was bare to the waist, his chest covered with soot-black hair. The collar of his khaki uniform jacket draped across a nearby chair showed a star and staff insignia. A neat silver nametag above the right pocket read “Col. Bwultuzu, Bupu Patriotic Front” in thin black letters. A gallon bottle of tejiyaa balanced on one knee. On either side of him sat two naked young girls. They looked no older than ten, each grasping her own gallon bottle of tejiyaa improbably large in her small hands. But as he approached with the others, Wilson saw the girls were not girls at all. They were diminutive young women, about four feet tall, their skin a lustrous purple-black, their breasts perfectly formed, capped with nipples like small black beetles.

  Colonel Bwultuzu sprang up and enveloped Captain Page in a massive bear hug. Together the huge African, the Napoleon-size pirate, and the two minuscule naked women looked like the members of a perverse circus act.

  “My friend!” the colonel said in a booming voice. He smiled, revealing teeth like square postage stamps. “Good to see you so soon after your last visit!”

  “Didn’t think I’d be back till September, Colonel,” the pirate said, stepping out of reach of the big man’s hands. “Something came up. I have a proposition I’d like to discuss.”

  “You are all business, comme d’habitude.” Colonel Bwultuzu wagged his big head in mock disappointment. “But you must know that my soldiers have not yet captured enough of the enemy from the countryside to fill the hold of your ship. The summer campaign is still two weeks away. This time we attack Seme itself. In three months’ time I can promise you many strong young men from the hills. Anda traitors, of course. Still, their blood is red, and they will work many months in the sun before they die.”

  “This is not business as usual,” the pirate said. “My proposal will take a bit of explanation.”

  “Then we drink tejiyaa, we talk awhile, and when we are done talking …” The colonel smiled again with his postage stamp teeth and made an operatic gesture toward the two small women on the couch. “Which one do you choose?”

  “Iwo women, eh?” The pirate gave a sharp grin and looked down at them. “Never been with an Iwo before.”

  The small women looked up at him with the sad, imploring eyes of trapped animals.

  Colonel Bwultuzu clapped his hands and laughed. “We will make a good Bupu out of you yet, Captain,” he said.

  The pirate leaned over to the nearest woman and ran a hand across her breasts. She shivered, seemed to hesitate for a moment, then bit his arm with a quick, hard snap. He pulled away and hit her across the mouth. Cricket drew a sharp breath and turned her face into Wilson’s shoulder.

  “I think I’ll take this one,” the pirate said. “Teach her a thing or two.”

  “I warn you, my friend,” Colonel Bwultuzu said, smiling. “Once you’ve had an Iwo woman, you’ll never go back to full size.”

  “That’s a risk I’ll take,” the pirate said.

  “I bow to the connoisseur,” the colonel said. “You are a man of excellent appetites,” and he gave an elegant bow.

  The pirate took a few steps back, rubbing his arm where he had been bitten. “My people, Colonel …” He indicated the rest of them for the first time.

  “Of course.” Colonel Bwultuzu bowed again. “I shall make their comfort a question of paramount importance for my staff.”

  8

  Wilson and Cricket were shown to a large room on the second floor. Charred books and bits of paper lay scattered over the torn carpet. There was an overstuffed easy chair in good condition, a double bed with dirty sheets, and an old armoire that still contained two pairs of neatly folded socks and a yellowing packet of unused handkerchiefs. A bare lightbulb shone from an old table lamp. It cast a garish white light against the sandbags over the window.

  As Cricket took off her clothes, Wilson kicked around the junk on the floor, hands in his pockets. The charred books were in Swedish and French. He saw Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris, Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale, and a few volumes with unpronounceable names by Pär Lagerqvist. Behind the dresser on the floor he found a photograph of a stout middle-aged Frenchman in a tricolor sash, on his arm a slim blond woman half his age in a white dress. They were at a cocktail party, or perhaps a wedding, glasses of champagne in hand. Wilson knelt and picked the photograph from its broken-out frame. A date along one edge read “3 Fev.67.”

  “Here’s a theory,” he said. “This must have been the French ambassador’s house once. The master bedroom. And judging from the books and this picture, I’d say he married the youngest daughter of the Swedish ambassador. Figures. Just like a Frenchman.”

  He turned around to show Cricket the photograph, but she wasn’t listening. She sat naked, cross-legged on the bed, working at her toenails with a toenail clipper. The expression on her face registered somewhere between disgust and scorn. Wilson guessed she was thinking of her father and the Iwo woman downstairs. How long had she endured such perversities? He hesitated and studied her in this unlovely demeanor, in the harsh white light, thinking that she looked hard and ugly just now. Then he caught sight of her sex between her legs, and a lewd little spark ran down from the lizard cortex of his brain, and he was filled with a desire that made his knees go weak.

  “Cricket,” he said softly.

  She looked up, scowling.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said, and pressed her lips together and stared back down at her toes. “Actually I’m feeling like I want to be alone right now. Why don’t you take a walk, find the bathroom or something?”

  “Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”

  “No,” she said.

  Wilson went out into the dark hallway and closed the door behind him. Halfway down, two militia soldiers were throwing dice against a scuffed patch of baseboard. Shards of a broken vase and bits of plaster lay across a hall table to their left. Plasterwork from the ceiling had fallen in; live electrical wires hung down like live snakes. The soldiers looked up as Wilson approached. One of them chewed a fist-size wad of kaf. The black leaves hung from his mouth, black juices drooling down his chin.

  “I’m looking for the bathroom,” Wilson said to both of them.

  The one with a mouthful of kaf simply blinked and turned away. The other shook his head. Their assault rifles sat propped against the wall, mundane as dust mops.

  “Zum clo,” Wilson said. “Le toilet, WC.” Then he made a pissing gesture.

  “Ah!” The one without the mouthful of kaf sprang up, took Wilson by the arm, and pulled him down the dark corridor. They turned left, then right, and entered a large European-style bathroom with a ceramic tub and a bidet. The stench here was incredible. The toilet w
as backed up; urine and fecal matter spread across the floor. The soldier led Wilson past this slop and out a pair of French doors that opened onto a wide balcony. He pushed Wilson up to the railing, pointed over the edge, and made a pissing noise between his teeth.

  “O.K.,” Wilson said. He unzipped and stared down at the black ruin of Rigala below. The broken towers of downtown showed in uneven silhouette against flashes of artillery from the foot of Mount Mtungu. The faint trill of a woman screaming came from somewhere not far away, and there was the continual background sputter of automatic weapons fire. The soldier stood close behind, breathing heavily. Wilson tried to pee but couldn’t. This was embarrassing, happened to him in bus stations and airports. Why didn’t the man just go away? Wilson tried to concentrate, cleared his throat, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and thought about dripping trees after a rainstorm, and running water, but it was no good. Then, he cleared his throat again.

  “Ah, forgive me, you will want your privacy,” the soldier said after a beat. He spoke good English with an American accent. “I’ll just smoke a cigarette. Take your time.” He moved down to the far end of the balcony. Wilson heard the snap of a match, stared down into the blackness of the yard below, counted to ten, and watched his urine arc off into the night like a prayer. A slight drumming sound came from below a half second later and he imagined the stuff splattering over the roof of a car. It wasn’t till Wilson turned around and zipped up his pants that he realized there was something familiar about the soldier’s voice.

  The soldier stood in shadow at the far end against the house. All Wilson could make out of his face was the orange tip of his cigarette.

  “Cigarette?” the familiar voice said, and a dark hand held a pack of Egyptian cigarettes into the yellow square of light from a nearby window.