by Peter David
“Really. And what would that condition be?”
His face grim, Quintero said, “The woman — Maria. She is mine to deal with. Mine to punish. You will not take any action against her.”
Zorro did not have to give his response the slightest bit of thought.
“Done,” said Senor Zorro.
Chapter Sixteen
Ghost in the Ship
The pirates partied hardily for the rest of the evening and well towards morning. As far as they were concerned, this entire adventure had been most beneficial. They had discovered the chest of Calico Jack and had taken it for themselves. They did not know what the contents were, but it was bound to be formidable. Jewelry, money, gold doubloons, whatever it contained, was sure to make them rich men.
Diabolito, for his part, did not seem all that interested in partying with his crew. Instead his entire attentions were on Maria, and he brought her down to his quarters, which had belonged to del Riego until Diabolito had taken over his ship. He took Maria to bed, and the two of them managed to keep their subsequent noises and squeals to a minimum level so as not to disturb the crew topside.
When they were both spent, they lay there with sweat on their brows, Maria curled up into the crook of Diabolito’s arm.
“Matias …” she said softly.
He interrupted her. “I despise that name. Why do you keep using it?”
“Because it is your true name.”
He shook his head. “It is the name of my birth, a name that I had never been enamored of. I’ve let you use it because it seems to please you in doing so, but I have tired of hearing it. Call me Diabolito. Or ‘Diablo’ if you must have a name that is unique for you to employ.”
She paused, obviously trying to decide if this was a case worth arguing about, and then she sighed and realized it was probably easier to let him have his way. “Very well, Diablo. Have you fully considered what is to transpire with my brother?”
“I told you. I will likely ransom him.”
“But who do you think will be willing to pay for him? The governor has a firm rule that he does not deal with outlaws. Certainly the Emperor will not give any money toward his freedom. What will you do with him if you are not able to get any ransom for him?”
“His parents, then.”
She actually laughed at that. “His parents? You mean my parents? They do not have two pesos to rub together. That endeavor will come up empty.”
Diabolito shrugged. “Then I will deliver him to Poseidon and he can do what he wishes.”
“The god of the oceans,” she said slowly. “You mean you will simply dump him over the side of the ship.”
“That is exactly correct.” He seemed puzzled. “Why? Is that an issue with you?”
“No.”
“You have often told me there is no love lost between you and your sibling. Do not tell me that you have changed your mind in that regard?”
“Of course not. But he’s … ”
“He’s what?”
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He’s still my brother. That means something to me. I’ve no idea what, exactly, but something.”
“And I should spare him because of that? Is that what you are telling me?”
“I would never dare tell you anything, Mathi — “
Diabolito sat up quickly and swung his hand around. It smacked against Maria’s face with such ferocity that it knocked the naked woman out of the bed. She lay on the floor, gasping, her hand flying to her injured cheek and tentatively touching the large redness that was the right half of her face.
“Are you out of your mind, woman?! I told you what to call me. Do you think you alone, of all the souls on this ship, are entitled to ignore my direct orders?!?”
I’m not part of your crew. You don’t get to order me around. Those thoughts flitted through her head but she dared not give voice to them. “No,” she said, her voice soft and terrified.
“Would you like me to throw you to my crew in your current state of undress? What do you think would happen to you then?!”
She had no answer, but she knew perfectly well what the drunken reprobates on the deck over their heads would do to her. She didn’t even attempt to reply. Instead she dropped her head and, her voice becoming so soft that it was scarcely above what a mute would have uttered, she said, “No.”
“No … what?”
“No, Diablo,” she said.
He nodded, pleased with her extreme deference and use of the name that he had told her to employ. “Good,” he said, and patted the bed. She slid back into place next to him, her face pulsing in pain but making no move to try and stem the discomfort she was feeling.
They both lay there in silence for a moment, and then Diabolito rumbled, “You want to make sure your brother lives, don’t you.”
“Yes,” she said very softly.
It was hard for her to admit that, even to herself. She had always believed that she had no feelings of love for Juan. They had never gotten along. But … but …
“There was a time,” she said, “when I was very young. I had barely reached maturity. And a man showed great interest in me. He was very old; somewhere in his fifties. But he had a good deal of money, which made him of interest to my father. My father permitted him to come courting me, even though I had no desire for his attention. The last time he came courting, he became very physical with me. Groped me, tore my clothing. He would have done far more if I had not sunk my teeth into his hand, drawing blood. He cried out in pain, snarled at me, threw me down and stormed out of the house. My father came to me and scolded me for fighting back against it.
“And Juan was witness to it all.
“He left the house right after that. He was gone for quite some time, and when he returned, he sat down with me in my room and swore to me that the bad man would never come to hurt me again.”
“Did he kill him?” asked Diabolito, intrigued. “Or did he simply warn him off?”
“I never knew,” she admitted. “He never went into any details. But he was right, the terrible man never came back. My father blamed me for it, believing that I had repulsed him by biting him. But Juan was the reason the man never dared to come pay a call to me. Whether he broke his nose or broke his spine and left him in a ditch somewhere, it didn’t matter. He was gone from my life, and I had never been more grateful.”
“And you have carried that young woman you were in your breast ever since.”
“I suppose.”
He reached over and patted her hand. “I will release him when I release the other members of this ship’s crew.”
She couldn’t quite believe what she had just heard. “Release them? I thought you were holding them all for ransom.”
He waved off the notion dismissively. “That was my back-up plan should the treasure not turn out to be genuine. Yet now it sits in our hold. How many riches does a man truly need?”
She kissed him passionately, the ache in her cheek forgotten. So what if he had struck her in impatience. The fact that he was willing to release Juan confirmed to her that he truly cared about her. Then she sat up and said, “I’m going to tell my brother so.”
“As you wish,” he said with a careless gesture.
She stumbled to her feet, threw on her clothes, and headed for the room where she knew her brother was being held.
As she clambered to the lower sections of the ship, she discovered she very much did not like it. It was dark, it was dank. It seemed most unwelcoming to normal human beings. Instead it appeared to be somewhere that ghosts would prefer to inhabit.
She was holding a candle to provide her illumination and she finally made it to the door that she knew contained her brother. She rapped on the door and called, “Juan.”
“What do you want?” came his irritated voice from the other side of the door.
“Math — ” She caught it and correct herself. “Diabolito has promised me that he will free you.”
“Oh, has h
e.” The reply came to her with obvious disbelief and sarcasm.
“Yes, he has.”
“The promise of a pirate means nothing to me, Maria. And if you were using any aspect of your brains, it would mean nothing to you as well. Gentlemen can be counted on to keep their word. Pirates can be counted on to break it.”
“You do not know him, Juan.”
“I know his type. I have been battling his type my entire adult life. And if there is one thing I can promise you, Maria, it is that he will not keep his promise to you. The first opportunity he has to do something foul to me, he will do so.”
Her temper began to flare. She could not understand why Juan was acting in this manner. “You don’t know him as I do, Juan. He has a caring, nurturing side.”
At this statement, Juan Quintero roared with laughter. “Are you serious?” he asked, when he managed to pull himself together. “You are staking my life onto a pirate’s nurturing side. When I am tied to the front of a cannon, with its barrel in my stomach and Diabolito is lighting the fuse, talk to me then about his nurturing side.”
“Oh, you’re hopeless!” she cried out. “I don’t know why I even bother —”
Her voice caught and she gasped.
Down at the far end of the hallway, she was certain she had just seen a black clad figure. It had only been for a moment and then it vanished from sight. But it had looked just like …
“Is something wrong?” came Quintero’s voice. “You’ve stopped extolling your lover’s virtue.”
She tried to form words but they were remaining bottled in her throat. It couldn’t be. It was impossible.
“I … I … ”
Quintero actually sounded concerned. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“I thought I saw … ” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper. “Zorro.”
There was a long pause. Quintero didn’t respond immediately, and when no answer was instantly forthcoming, she banged her fist on the door. “Juan?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said finally. “It is a ghost. You are being haunted.”
No, that’s impossible. That’s insane. “There’s … there’s no such things as ghosts,” she managed to say.
“You’re sailing with a crew that would disagree. Ask any of them and all will swear that creatures you would dismiss as impossibilities are, in fact, most real.”
“How … why … ?”
“Why would the ghost of Zorro choose you to haunt? You said it yourself: You were responsible for his death. Spirits are rarely likely to forgive and forget.”
“This is madness,” she said, trying to shake it off. “He can’t … it can’t … ”
“The real Zorro is doubtless lying broken at the bottom of the cliff. For all we know, animals are feeding on his flesh. So since he can’t be here, and yet you say you saw him, that leaves one of two conclusions: Either his ghost has pursued you here, or else your fevered imagination made you think you saw him. Choose which explanation you prefer and act accordingly.”
That choice proved remarkably simple for Maria. “I imagined it,” she said firmly. “I imagined it. That is all that happened, and I will tell no one on the crew what I thought I saw, because I simply thought it. But it did not really happen. That’s all. It did. Not. Happen.”
“I hope you are right,” came Juan’s calm voice. “Because if you are wrong, well, ghosts are capable of inflicting some rather hideous punishments on those who have wronged them. And they are especially vicious if they are murder victims and encounter those who dispatched them to the afterlife — ”
“Shut up!” she cried out. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Angrily she hiked up her skirt and kicked the door. “I have no idea why I cared about what happens to you, Juan. You are a terrible, evil person!”
“I hear that all the time,” said Quintero who sounded immensely amused by the entire conversation.
“Oh!” she cried and slammed the door with her fist. This, as it turned out, was the worst thing she could have done. The blow scratched her fingers and broke one of her knuckles. She held her hand and moaned in pain, and was rewarded with an amused chuckle from her brother who no doubt knew what she had done and thought it funny as well.
She stormed away and at that point stopped thinking about her brother. He would see for himself Diabolito’s generous nature and would be humbled into silence. It was a state that she was most eager to see unfold.
***
Moments later Zorro sidled to the door and without bothering to announce himself, said, “Quick thinking, Captain.”
“She would probably have come to the same conclusion herself. I simply urged her along the way.”
“Either way, your tale was much appreciated.”
“I assume you allowed yourself to be seen because you were testing me to see what I would do. Correct?”
“Of course,” said Zorro, who had in fact simply been sloppy and thought that his costume was providing him more camouflage than it did. “And you passed with flying colors.”
“With what?”
Zorro blinked in surprise. “With flying colors. You’ve never heard the term?”
“No. What does it mean?”
“It’s a nautical term. Ships would return home with their colors, or flags, flying to show that they had been victorious in their mission.”
“Well, I may be at sea at the moment, but I am a mere landlubber, so kindly keep your praise confined to terms we all know.”
“As you prefer, my captain,” and Zorro tossed off a salute that Quintero would never see.
Then he turned around and headed off in the general direction of Diabolito’s cabin. There he would take up a position in the shadows and wait for the pirate to fall asleep.
A part of him was not enthused about the plan: stab Diabolito in his slumber. If he were on his own on this mission, he would hesitate to take such an ungentlemanly, unworthy manner of dispatching his foe. But his father was involved in this, so he had no choice.
The plan was simple: Sooner or later the pirates would discover the dead body of their leader. Immediately accusations would flash between all of them, each claiming that the other had murdered the Little Devil. Fights would break out all over the ship. When the crew, in their battle, winnowed their numbers down to a sufficiently small crowd, Zorro, Quintero and Alejandro would assault the remainder of them and take over the ship.
It was a perfect plan. And yes, it meant he would not have the chance to battle Diabolito again in a fair fight, but this was a pirate. When did such concepts as fairness ever apply to him anyway?
Don Alejandro’s life was at stake. Zorro did not have the luxury of behaving like a gentleman when his father’s life was hanging in the balance.
Then, as Zorro approached the doors to Diabolito’s quarters, he heard movement from within. Quickly he darted back into the shadows to await and see if Diabolito emerged.
He did. His sword clearly dangling from his hip, he strode out of the cabin and headed topside without glancing around, which was fortunate for Zorro since it wasn’t the best hiding place he had ever adopted. It didn’t matter because Diabolito’s focus was clearly elsewhere.
Zorro stepped further away and found a better hiding place, in shadows behind an oversized barrel. There he crouched, waiting for Diabolito to return and go to sleep. It was somewhere around midnight so Zorro was confident that the pirate would come back to the cabin and this entire misadventure would finally be over.
Chapter Seventeen
The Contents of the Chest
The early morning sun crept up over the horizon, and Diabolito was standing on the deck, swaying gently back and forth as the ocean waves caressed the ship’s hull. He had been up the entire evening, his brain far too charged with excited thoughts to allow him slumber.
The same could obviously not be said of his crew. A handful of men were still awake, maintaining the ship on its course, but the rest had passed out in various places on the deck. Snorin
g filled the air and Diabolito found it funny, until he didn’t. With the sun rising and their pirate ship now visible, his crew’s extended slumber began to annoy him.
He pulled his pistol out of his belt, aimed it straight up, and fired. The abrupt discharge startled many of them into preliminary wakefulness, and Diabolito pushed them the rest of the way. “Wake up, you scabrous dogs!” he bellowed. “Get to your damned posts before I nail you to them!”
That was all the incentive required. Pirates scrambled to their feet and ran to their various positions on the deck.
From far off, the pirate ship discharged a cannon blast as a clear sign of greeting. Diabolito’s crew cheered and waved as if they were coming together with long lost loved ones. Diabolito took position behind the steering wheel and turned the ship’s course toward the oncoming vessel.
Long minutes later the ships had moved to within close proximity of each other. The pirate ship was extending a plank long enough to reach their ship if it drew close enough.
Diabolito guided the galleon with extreme caution; he had no desire to have the two ships collide. Within moments the two ships were close enough that the plank was able to lay flat on the galleon. Thus was a primitive but effective bridge built between the vessels.
The pirates on the pirate ship — the Cuban Revenge, by name — cheered their captain loudly. Diabolito bowed to them as if he were on a stage and they were his enthused audience.
“Bring up Lieutenant Commander del Riego and his associates!” Diabolito called to the men in the other vessel. “They should see the outcome of this adventure.” Then he turned to the men standing behind him and said, “Bring forward the chest.”
The chest had been stowed in the aft section of the deck. It had been so bulky that it didn’t seem worth the trouble to bring it down to the lower section of the ship. Tomas and Jose brought it forward, grinning like demented fools. When the pirates on the Revenge saw it they once more let out a loud cheer, and began chanting “Lit-tle Dev-il!” over and over.