The Pirate's Daughter

by Robert Girardi

  Wilson remembered the wild, blank eyes of the Iwo women in Rigala and shuddered. “So how many of them can you cram in below?” he heard himself say. The muddy water of the Mwtutsi made a slight hushing sound against the hull.

  Schlüber shrugged. “Eighty-five to a hundred, we figure,” he said.

  Wilson snapped toward the German. “You lousy sons of bitches!” he said between his teeth.

  Schlüber took a step back, shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way for me. Anything’s better than what I had before.”

  “What’s worse than the slave trade?” Wilson said.

  “Remind me to tell you my life story sometime,” Schlüber said. “For now let’s just say I had a good job with a top accounting firm in Frankfurt and a pretty girlfriend and a nice new Porsche 911 and a nice apartment, and I played soccer on the weekends with my friends and ate good German food in nice restaurants and drank good beer and smoked a little hash now and then, and I didn’t care about any of it. I was dead. That’s all civilized society does for you, my friend, makes you dead. There’s nothing at stake. At least here”—he pushed his chin toward the tangle of the jungle—“I can feel my heart beating.”

  Wilson turned to the water and raised the plumb line. His stiff back spoke a volume of scorn. Schlüber hesitated, cursed once, and headed off toward the navigational octagon. But in truth Wilson understood the man all too well. He had experienced the same ennui. It had ripped through his life like a whirlwind, driven him from the solace of Andrea’s willing arms, from the comfortable, shabby apartment where he had lived unmolested for eight years, on a strange journey across the sea and into the heart of Africa with the worst sorts of companions available anywhere in the world.

  A few seconds later, the flat surface of the Mwtutsi bulged off the starboard, and Wilson caught a dull flash of primordial eye and leathery flank, nubbled as an ear of corn, and a crocodile rose to the surface for a moment before the black river washed over it and the ominous stillness of the jungle descended again.

  11

  Morning sun revealed a blighted landscape. The jungle and swamps of the Ulundi country had faded into the night. Now the river flowed past a charred terrain, scattered with burnt-out military equipment. Black, lifeless soil reached into the smudgy distance. Even the water smelled strongly of burned rubber.

  “The Andas did this,” the pirate said. “About five years ago they torched a swath through the jungle thirty miles wide with surplus Vietnam War–era defoliants. Stopped the Bupu advance on Seme, cold. General Ature with the APP masterminded the whole thing. He was one smart motherfucker. In war, he told me once, the only object is to win. Who cares what you’re left with when it’s over?”

  Wilson peered over the hot armor plating of the navigational octagon. The banks were a tangle of burnt tree roots and rusting black metal. Bones punctuated the ground like question marks.

  “How long will it take the trees to grow back?”

  “Grow back?” The pirate gave a wolfish laugh. “When the Romans took Carthage, they sowed the ground with salt so nothing would grow there again. You’ve got a similar situation here. Going to look good and burnt for the next thousand years at least.”

  At noon they passed an abandoned Bupu village that marked the edge of the devastation and were once again among the trees. Here the river narrowed to no more than twenty yards across. Vegetation grew so thick overhead the sky was hidden from view.

  “Watch the jungle along here,” the pirate said. It sounded like an order. Wilson went to the small arms closet for the binoculars.

  “Don’t worry about them.” The pirate waved him away. “This is for your own amusement.”

  Wilson stared foolishly at the far bank for a half hour before he began to see pale beams of light flickering from the darkness between the trees.

  “It’s the Iwos,” the pirate said to Wilson’s question. “The primitive little bastards worship light.”

  “You mean the sun?” Wilson said.

  “No. They worship light. Flashlights, actually. Who knows why? Probably because it’s so goddamned dark in the deep jungle where they live. They’ll sell their own grandmother for a couple of flashlights. Know what we’ve got in the hold?”

  “No,” Wilson said.

  “Ten crates of cheap plastic flashlights from Taiwan. The batteries wear out in a couple of weeks. It’s like an addictive drug to the Iwos; they always need more.”

  An hour before dark the Dread passed close by an Iwo warrior paddling along in a dugout no bigger than a kitchen sink. Long black feathers trailed from his hair, matted down with mud. His chest and arms were streaked with white paint; white circles scrawled around his eyes. A red plastic flashlight hung on a length of twine from his neck. As he came even with them, he stopped paddling, raised his flashlight to his chin, and clicked it on. The faint beam caught the white paint and lit his face like a skull in the green gloom of the jungle. The Iwo remained motionless, flashlight under his chin, as the current of the river bore him out of sight.

  12

  Lake Tsuwanga glowed a liquid gold in the afternoon sun. A cool breeze blew from the direction of Mount Mosumbawa, which showed its blue peak beyond the nearest foothills. From the bow cage of the Dread, Wilson filled his lungs with fresh mountain air and watched the cattails bend in the wind and the scarlet swirl of birds over the lake. A slight dappling of the surface meant the flying fish were running; when they hit the air, it was like a handful of silver coins thrown out of the water toward the sky. He saw the pelicans and cormorants dive to meet them, squabbling gracefully above the tips of the waves. In the hazy distance the yellow sail of a Bupu fishing skiff filled with wind and swelled toward shore.

  The lake was famous as much for its scenic quality as for the fact that few white men had seen it and lived—perhaps no more than a few dozen in the 150-year history of African exploration by Europeans. Wilson remembered reading an article in National Geographic that told of the lake’s discovery in 1830 by Sir Alwyn Carew, who had been looking for the source of the Niger, then one of the great mysteries of geography. After a year and a half in the interior Carew foundered starving and nearly naked onto Tsuwanga’s bright shores. This experience, he later wrote, was like emerging into a dream of light from the dark horrors of the jungle.

  Carew was right, Wilson thought; the light here was clear and beautiful. But after an hour, Wilson became aware of something else, a disturbing quality he couldn’t put his finger on. A disquieting shade lurked in the blue shadows the sun made upon the deck. Here was beauty that did not need human contemplation. The whole lake hummed with its own apartness. Staring out at the blue water, Wilson almost understood what had happened to Carew—in the end the perfect light had driven him mad: On his second expedition up the Mwtutsi, the explorer had brought, along with the usual equipment and supplies, I50 passenger pigeons on a barge christened HMS Alexander Pope. Two of these loyal birds eventually reached the British coastal station at Williamsport with rambling, incomprehensible dispatches full of giant snakes and midgets and butterflies big as kites. Carew was never heard from again.

  Fifty years later, in 1882, in the market at Bongola, an officer of the West African Company traded a hunting knife to a Bupu chief for a leather-bound English edition of the comedies of Goldoni. He was surprised to find such an incongruous item in the middle of the jungle and asked the chief where he had gotten the volume. A white man had given the book to the Iwos in the time of his grandfather, the chief said; then the white man had jumped into the water of the lake to live with the fish. On the flyleaf the officer found two words scrawled in Carew’s hand in a dark something that looked like blood: “Fear Ascendant.”

  Now, a lavender illumination filled the sky above Lake Tsuwanga, and the mountain and the waves looked unspeakably lovely against this sad color, and Wilson thought of the Great Carew’s bones perhaps lying off in the deep water beneath the keel. Washed clean by cold cur
rents, they kept the company of unnamed mollusks and strange anemones at the bottom, another Englishman swallowed whole by Africa.

  13

  The Dread dieseled at low throttle into a cove at the western end of the lake. Here a ragged Bupu settlement spread a half mile along the shore. In the dusky light Wilson saw military tents and rusty-sided Quonset huts side by side with traditional cupcake-shaped Bupu haotas—tribal dwellings of tarred reeds built around a courtyard of green polished dung. At the northern end of the village, on a mound of earth, was a wooden palisade surrounded by a series of low cages. Instead of a flag, the place was watched over by a dozen severed heads on poles. Clouds of mosquitoes and blood-fed bottle flies drifted out across the water on the wind.

  “The Bupus call it M’Gongo epo,” Cricket said. “The place of tears. It’s their only base in Iwo country.”

  Wilson was silent.

  “There are probably two hundred different Iwo clans, each in a continual state of warfare with the other. I know what you’re going to say, that the Iwos are fighting and selling each other into slavery because of us, because they want to get their hands on the flashlights we’ve got in the hold. Well, the Iwos have been fighting each other since the beginning of the world and will be fighting each other when we’re gone.”

  Cricket plucked at peeling skin on her wrist. Her nose was burnt and red. She’d run out of sunblock two days out of Rigala. She took off her sunglasses, and Wilson saw there were worry lines in the raccoon mask of white around her eyes.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do,” she said after a beat. “But we’ve got to put up with it for a little while.”

  “That’s what you keep telling me,” Wilson said.

  “Two years of this life and we’re in Paris,” she said. “Just try to think about that over the next couple of days.”

  “Yes,” Wilson said. “But how many bones do we have to step over to get to the Champs-Elysées?”

  Cricket turned her face away and didn’t answer.

  The Dread shifted to the starboard as Mustapha lowered the motorized dinghy and climbed over the side. The pirate and Schlüber joined him there, and the sound of the seventy-five-horsepower Evinrude disturbed the pristine silence of the lake.

  “We’re going in,” the pirate called over the outboard’s steady burp. Then he made an annoyed gesture, and Mustapha turned down the throttle and they slid back to where Wilson and Cricket were standing at the stern rail. The pirate looked up from his seat in the rubber boat, a sour evaluation that passed across the two of them.

  “The situation could get a little tricky here, I want your husband to know that,” the pirate said, looking at Wilson.

  “O.K., Dad,” Cricket said.

  “No squeamishness, no lapses into fucking middle-class morality, no womanish hysterics. Got that, citizen?”

  Wilson turned slowly and stared straight into the pirate’s black eyes. “Fuck you, old man,” he said after a beat.

  The pirate’s jaw tightened. “Mustapha,” he said, and the African hit the throttle and the rubber boat lifted toward the shore.

  Wilson watched them go. Dark figures waited on the stony beach in the diminishing light.

  Cricket and Wilson and Ngyuen sat down to a cold dinner in the navigational octagon an hour later. The digital instrumentation on the operational console gave out the cheerful glow of Christmas lights. Wilson ate a cheese and tomato sandwich and leftover potato-leek soup from a Tupperware container. Cricket ate a few rice cakes with honey and a salad. The Vietnamese cook ate cold fava beans from a bowl with a wooden spoon. Perched on top of the taffrail, staring down at them, he looked like a sort of malignant owl. Over the shortwave came raucous static interrupted by an occasional manic burst of Morse code.

  “Captain Amundsen could read that stuff like a newspaper,” Wilson said absently.

  “Don’t think about him,” Cricket said in a low voice. “Right now our life’s all about not looking back.”

  “Cap Amundsen, he dead,” Nguyen said. “Food for sharks.”

  “I wish it were the other way around,” Wilson said. “I wish your ass was food for sharks.”

  “I wonder how much longer you got, joe,” the cook said. “This place not agree with you. I smell bad luck floating in the air. Maybe your luck run out here.” Then he began to giggle, an eerie, childish sound in the lake darkness.

  “Nguyen!” Cricket stood and pushed her finger at him. “Sick of your shit—” but just then a high-pitched screaming reached them from the shore, followed a moment later by the ominous chanting of many voices.

  The three of them turned to look at the village sprawled along the shore, a hazy muddle of firelight and smoke on the edge of a greater darkness.

  “They’ve started,” Cricket said quietly, her face hidden in shadow. “I won’t listen to that crap all night. Give us some power, Mr. Nguyen. We’ll motor back with first light.”

  The cook hesitated; then he shrugged and went over to the controls. Soon there was the comforting thud of the diesels, and Cricket took them a mile or so out into the center of the lake. She killed the engine and dropped anchor in the dark water, but it would not strike bottom. Lake Tsuwanga is impossibly deep, one of the deepest lakes in the world. The anchor fell through the cold fathoms as through space. The Dread listed against the black outline of Mount Mosumbawa.

  “So we stay up all night, to keep her off the rocks,” Cricket said. “I wasn’t planning on going to sleep anyway. You?”

  “No,” Wilson said.

  “I was,” the cook said, and disappeared below.

  The automatic winch brought the anchor back into the bow casing, and the Dread drifted through the black toward morning. There was no light but the inconsequential flickering of the stars and the faint glow of the console.

  Cricket unbuttoned her shirt and stepped out of her shorts. In a moment, she stood naked beneath the pale stars, her body glowing with its own phosphoresence.

  “Remember this is supposed to be a working honeymoon,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Wilson said.

  “So I want you to make love to me,” she said, her voice lowering an octave, then she settled back onto the bench and opened her legs. “We’ll say it’s five, ten years from now. This is a pleasure cruise. We’re in the middle of some tame body of water, Lake Geneva, say. Better, Lake Como. It’s a beautiful night in late summer, our children are sleeping below. I am your wife and I love you and you love me—”

  “Shut up,” Wilson said. He walked over to where she was sitting, legs apart, and dropped to his knees.

  14

  Two long skiffs motored out to the Dread across the cool surface of the lake at noon the next day.

  Six BPF soldiers, done up in a startling combination of combat fatigues and primitive jewelry, climbed aboard. Wilson saw a necklace of dried fruit that wasn’t dried fruit but shriveled human ears, headbands of teeth and finger bones. One of the soldiers gave a few harsh commands in Bupu and gestured toward the shore. The others milled around the deck, bored and dangerous.

  “What’s going on here?” Wilson said. He couldn’t help the tremulous note in his voice.

  “Steady,” Cricket said. “We’re going over to participate in what you might call the, uh, ceremonies closing the deal. Considered a necessary thing. Seals the contract between buyer and seller. I’ll warn you, it’s pretty disgusting. Don’t do anything stupid and try not to vomit.”

  “You’re kidding,” Wilson said. The back of his neck felt cold.

  “I’m not kidding,” Cricket said.

  Wilson buckled on his pistol and bayonet, put extra cartridges in his belt, and got into the lead skiff. The smell of blood rose in his nostrils as they landed on the beach of glossy stones and went up through the village. No one spoke. Reddish smoke hung faint as a sigh in the air, and there was the acrid, sweet pungence of roasting meat. A yellow dog gnawed at a long bone in the middle of the street. They came up past the far Quonset hut and
turned down a narrow alley lined with small cages of untreated timber. Wilson had to look twice to realize human beings were packed into these cages. Men and women no taller than four feet high stared out as the soldiers passed. A few extended their hands, and the air was filled with a sad, reproachful clicking sound.

  When they reached the palisade, Wilson saw it was not made of wood, as he had thought, but constructed from human bones lashed to iron girders anchored in the ground. Across the gate, skulls hung in a clever pattern like an inverted pentagram. Wilson made a quick calculation and guessed that the bones of thousands had gone into this gruesome construction. Horror welled up like an ache in his heart. Inside, the ground of packed earth was red and slippery-looking. A naked Iwo woman sagged at a stake before a wide stone table. At her feet a goat with broken legs foundered around in the red mud.

  Captain Page and the others waited beneath an awning made from an old parachute. Schlüber squatted in the dirt, a blank expression on his face. Beneath a larger awning off to the left, a group of BPF officers stood grouped around a naked African seated in an old floral-print La-Z-Boy recliner. The African wore three strands of human molars around his neck and a five-foot-tall headdress of ribs and feathers. His skin was scrawled with tattoos and raised scars, his eyes wide with madness. In his right hand he held an ashtzisi made from carved human bones wrapped in gold foil. Two naked teenage boys stood at attention directly behind his chair. Their uncircumcised penises were moored to their thighs with braided leather thongs.

  “At last your family has arrived, Captain,” the African called out in a polite British-accented English. “We have been waiting. Please introduce us.”

  The pirate took Wilson and Cricket over to the chair. Wilson assumed he was being presented to the devil himself.

  “Major Charles Mpongu and staff,” the pirate said. “My daughter and son-in-law.”