Wilson watched for a while and the world seemed alive with feathery movement. “There are a hell of a lot of birds out there,” he said.
“As of last count three hundred and seventy-five separate species, and half of them exist nowhere else in the world,” Cricket said.
“Why here, particularly?” Wilson said.
“Actually it’s because of the bugs,” Cricket said. “The birds eat the bugs. The bugs are here because the reeds and the tide pools make an ideal habitat. The reeds and the tide pools are here because—” She shrugged. “You get the idea.”
“What kind of bugs?” Wilson said.
“Locusts, flying cockroaches, termites, Java beetles, bottle flies, mosquitoes, giant gnats, winged African earwigs, you name it. Go ahead, listen,” Cricket said. “You’ve got to concentrate to hear them.”
Wilson steadied himself against the bulkhead and listened. After a few seconds another sound became clear beneath the monotonous rumble of the diesel, a small pervasive chattering that was everywhere and nowhere. Then his eyes adjusted, and he saw them against the hazy, descending sun. Millions of black specks, the air thick and grainy with them.
“My God!” he said.
“Yeah,” Cricket said. “You can’t open your mouth topside without something flying in. The crew wears these mesh beekeeper’s hats when they go topside. Except for Dad. He just bats them away like they’re nothing. But I can’t stand the goddamn things, they give me the creeps. That’s why we’re down here for the duration of the voyage.”
“That the only reason?” Wilson said.
Cricket smiled, her breasts faintly translucent in the diminishing light.
Later that night, it was too hot to sleep. They lay in the hot darkness not touching because of the heat. Wilson listened to the chug of the engines and the dull drone of the insects and wondered what the future would hold. How would he find his way home again? Where would he wake up tomorrow or a week from tomorrow? What did his dread have in store for him next?
“My father will kill you if he can find a way,” Cricket said suddenly.
Wilson was startled; it seemed she could read his mind.
“So why doesn’t he just come down now and get it over with?” Wilson said.
“He wouldn’t dare with me around,” Cricket said. “He knows I’d report him to the Thirty Captains. Even we pirates live by rules, you know. You’re mine by authority of the Articles, and the Articles are law with us. There’s nothing more sacred to a pirate than property rights. But Dad is an unscrupulous bastard. There will be plenty of quiet opportunities ashore. We’re going to have to be very careful until he gets used to the idea of you being around.”
Cricket turned on her side. Then she turned back and put a hand on his thigh. “I love you,” she said in a voice that Wilson had to strain to hear. “You don’t have to say anything, not a word, if you don’t want to.”
Wilson didn’t say anything.
“You don’t believe me.”
“O.K., you love me,” Wilson said with some bitterness. “Is that why you dragged me into this mess against my will? I’m not a pirate, I’m not a murderer,” she pulled away at this “and I’m telling you now, the first chance I get, I’m clearing out.”
“Impossible,” Cricket said quietly. “Where would you go?”
“Home,” Wilson said.
“Your home’s here with me now. Remember that mark on your shoulder?”
Before he could reply, Wilson felt her slide down the damp mattress and he felt her breasts against his leg, and he stiffened and her mouth was on him there.
Grassy hummocks covered with sleeping birds fell away into tropical gloom beyond the porthole. The shallow black water swarmed with insects. Slowly evolving creatures, unnamed and sinewy, half fish, half something else, swam up toward the fading light.
2
Along the crowded cement wharves, cranes hoisted pallets full of dark cargo into dilapidated freighters that showed no flag or registry. The dockyard was a mess of crates and livestock and rusty scrap metal. Native dockworkers labored bare to the waist, their purple-black skin shining in the sun. Beyond a fifteen-foot barbed-wire fence, a shanty city lay strewn up the slope. Paths of red mud straggled and intersected in a crazy web through a maze of plywood shacks, lean-tos made from brush, and cardboard box huts tied together with vine. No, city was the wrong word for this ugly sprawl, Wilson thought. More like a garbage dump, teeming with humanity.
“Where are we?” He stood naked with a pair of binoculars at the porthole. It was only an hour or two after dawn but already hot enough to fry an egg on deck.
Cricket yawned and stuck her nose in the air. “From the putrid stench, I’d say it’s Quatre Sables,” she said. “No plumbing, no sewers, no nothing.”
“So this is Africa,” Wilson said, and there was an unexpected thrill at the thought. “Which country?”
“Sorry, it’s not quite Africa,” Cricket said. She sat up, scratching her head. “We’re still twenty-five miles or so off the Bupandan coast. You’re looking at the island of Quatre Sables, just south of the Mojangos. And it’s no country at all. Used to belong to Portugal, I guess; now it belongs to us. It’s a pirate republic.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
Cricket shrugged. “We claim no flag except the skull and crossbones. We govern ourselves by the Confederation of Thirty Captains under the Articles of Brotherhood. Everyone’s got their place in the chain of command.”
She came up and pressed into him from behind and put her arms around him and put her hands over his shoulders. “Look up there. Do you see the big places on the ridge?”
Wilson pointed the binoculars: high up the slope, a semicircle of fine white houses separated by a wall from the cardboard slums below. He caught a glimpse of green lawns and palm trees, thought he saw the sun glint off the windshield of a car.
“We live up there,” Cricket said.
“Who’s we?” Wilson said.
“The Thirty Captains. My father’s one of them. I called Quatre Sables a republic. That’s the wrong word. Oligarchy is better, I suppose. We own the ships; we plan the missions; we make the money; we make the rules.”
“What about all of them?” Wilson lowered the binoculars and gestured toward the trash city on the slope.
“Refugees, mostly. From the civil war in Bupanda. They’re not part of the Brotherhood.”
“What are they, then?”
Cricket shrugged, a cruel glint in her eye. “Cannon fodder.”
3
Wilson stood bewildered on the quay, his skin alive with prickly heat as the light faded lavender over the back of the island to the west. He felt light-headed after two days in Cricket’s cabin aboard the Storm Car. His jaw popped every time he swallowed; his knees ached. The gangs of dockworkers and the disembarking pirate crews passed in a blur of sweat and muscle. “You look a little green,” Cricket said.
“I’m fine,” Wilson said, but there was a faint buzzing in his inner ear.
“I’ve got to take care of a couple of things, shouldn’t be longer than fifteen,” Cricket said. “Here …” She reached into her duffel bag and pulled out her nickel-plated .38 and pushed it into the waistband of Wilson’s jeans. “If anyone bothers you, shoot them.” Then she was gone.
Wilson sat on a splintered crate and watched the crowds go by. He tried to concentrate and was taken with the grim realization that he would most likely never find his way home from this godforsaken place. Then nausea passed over him in a wave, and he closed his eyes and fought it down. When he opened his eyes again, he saw a column of about a hundred African men and women coming along the quay in a peculiar shuffling manner. As they drew closer, he heard the rattle and clink of metal and saw that they were shackled each to each; steel chains led from steel collars to manacles around their wrists and ankles. Guards armed with machine guns and cattle prods herded the column along toward a large cinder-block hangar at the far perimeter. Over the next
half hour, ten such columns passed. On the faces of the captives Wilson saw the same despair, the same hunted look, and it did not take long for him to realize the truth: These human beings were caught in the claws of an ancient evil.
When Cricket returned after an hour, Wilson rose off the crate and stood unsteadily before her. The .38 fell out of his jeans and clattered across the pavement.
“Hey!” Cricket said. “Be careful with that. You could shoot somebody in the foot.” But when she caught sight of his eyes, she crossed her arms and looked away. The silver pistol glinted on the stained cement between them.
“Slaves,” Wilson said, his voice a bare croak.
“I thought you knew,” Cricket said, and she would not meet his eyes.
“Where do they come from?” Wilson said.
“Africa.” Cricket shrugged. “Bupanda mostly.”
“Where are they taking them?”
“For now, the barracoon over there.” She pointed out the concrete hangars. “It’s where they hold the auctions.”
“My God,” Wilson said, and a shiver ran up his back.
“It’s the way things are here,” Cricket said gently. When she looked back at him, her eyes were lost in shadow. “I don’t like it either, but there’s nothing I can do right now. You can’t make good money from piracy alone. It’s too hard these days, too many risks involved. We only do the occasional special job, like the one we just pulled on Ackerman’s boat—well planned in advance, with an inside man, the works. Mostly it’s slaving raids to the Bupandan coast, then back here to the barracoon, where we unload the merchandise for sale.”
Now the sky bloomed black as dried blood against the dim bulk of the hill.
“How do you sleep at night?” Wilson managed.
“I don’t. That’s why I need you,” Cricket said, and she put her hard hands on the back of his neck and kissed him. “There’s a way out of this life. I want you to show me the way.”
Wilson let himself be led up the quay and through a gap in the barbed-wire fence to a waiting car. It was a battered Volkswagen Thing, bumpers and windshield missing, still painted the original purple, with the factory flower power decal kit popular in the late sixties. Mustapha sat in the passenger seat, shotgun on his lap, scars written across his skin like a threatening message. He watched with wary yellow eyes as Wilson climbed into the backseat.
“Hi,” Wilson said for no reason at all.
The man tapped the butt of his shotgun with two fingers. “Next time,” he said under his breath.
Cricket came around and got into the driver’s seat and put the Thing in gear, and they lurched over a rutted path and after a while turned left up a wider road that ascended the slope. The trash dwellings loomed in a primitive darkness unrelieved by electric lights. Wilson thought of the crazy cubist city in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and his head hurt with the thought. Unfamiliar constellations wheeled above. Starved faces passed before the wavering headlights, the faces of people of whom it could rightly be said were poor as dirt. Big-headed, ribby children lay in the mud around fires of scrap wood and dung. Shallow ditches were piled high with offal and the picked-over carcasses of dead animals. The stench was unbearable.
“They float across the straits in rafts made from old tires and oil drums,” Cricket said over the sputter of the engine. “We cull the strongest for sale in the barracoon, but even so, they keep on coming. Even this squalor is better for them than the massacres still going on in Bupanda.”
Wilson felt hot and cold at the same time, and the pain in his knees became so intense he stopped breathing for a few seconds. Cricket’s words faded in and out like a bad radio station. When he sank unconscious against the torn backseat, it was as if he were drowning in a sea of dirty water the color of human misery.
4
The monkey tittered like a bird on the windowsill, just the other side of the mosquito netting. About the size of a squirrel, with silky orange fur, a black tail, and a black tuft sticking straight up from its head like a Mohawk, it ate a mango in quick, nervous bites, turning the green fruit over between its paws as Wilson had seen humans turning an ear of buttered corn. He watched in silence for as long as he could; then he couldn’t stand the pain any longer and let out a short gasp. The monkey dropped the fruit, its face twisted up in surprise for half a second; then it began to howl. The sound was ear-shattering, loud, spiraling whoops like a siren, a sound ten times as big as the creature itself.
“Goddamned howler monkeys!” Wilson heard a man’s voice from the next room. He tried to turn toward the voice, but he could not move because of the pain in his joints. When he looked back at the windowsill, the monkey was gone.
A few minutes later a tall, stoop-shouldered man in a dingy white doctor’s coat entered the room. He was about forty, with a long red European face, scraggly brown hair that hung lank over his forehead and a nose with pores wide enough to drive a truck through. When the man sat beside the bed, Wilson caught the strong stench of alcohol. He put a limp hand on Wilson’s forehead, examined Wilson’s eyes, thumped on his chest.
“Are you a doctor?” Wilson said, and was surprised that his voice sounded so weak and uncertain.
“Evidently,” the doctor said, alcohol wafting out with the word.
“You’re drunk,” Wilson said.
The doctor shrugged. “Not drunk, exactly. Just a little—you know,” he wagged his hand back and forth. “It’s the only way to bear life in this pirate hell.”
“What am I doing here?” Wilson said, but his voice was already growing faint, and when he spoke, his knees hurt. The doctor put a hand on Wilson’s arm, a gesture that was neither friendly nor unfriendly.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Rest now.” Then he took a needle out of somewhere and gave Wilson an injection in his thigh and went away.
After that, Wilson fell into a drugged sleep in which he dreamed he was chained to a palm tree on a beach made of different-colored sand, all twisted up like chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream. In the dream, a man who resembled the doctor came along carrying a large scalpel in one hand and a strange animal in a wooden cage in the other. The animal was a sort of cross between a monkey and a wolf, with webbed claws and a mane of coppery hair and large, wet, innocent eyes. It was the eyes that made the animal dangerous. The doctor cut a square hole in Wilson’s stomach with the scalpel, took the animal out of the cage, put it in the hole, and sewed the hole back up. Wilson waited a minute or so, then he felt the animal scratching, and he felt the small, pointed teeth, and he knew the thing wouldn’t take long to eat its way out again.
5
In the morning, the sun shone saffron yellow through the big windows. Wilson lay on a square white bed under a canopy of mosquito netting in a room that gave out onto a tile patio with a view of the shanty city below. Rattan shades rattled at the window in a hot breeze. The walls of the room were painted terra-cotta red except for a creamy border around the ceiling, and there was an antique dresser and a large vanity and a table of inlaid wood upon which rested a bowl of pomegranates. Next to the door hung a very good reproduction of a nineteenth-century French painting, Léon Gérôme’s Le Bain aux Harem, which depicts an African slave girl bathing a white concubine in a blue-tiled pool. The room had a feminine feel that Wilson found pleasant and familiar. He lay in the sunlight and stretched and realized that his joints did not ache so much this morning.
When the light changed a little, a large black woman came through the door with a tray of spicy soup, bread, and sharp-tasting milk that probably came from a goat. Awhile later, the doctor called, still smelling of alcohol. He examined Wilson’s eyes, took his pulse, and listened to his lungs again.
“You’re eating today,” the doctor said, a vein in his nose pulsing gently. “Good. And you look much better.”
“Thanks,” Wilson said. “What’s wrong with me?”
“If we’re going to have a little talk, do you mind if I make myself a drink?” the doctor said. Before Wilson could
speak, the doctor was gone. He returned a few minutes later with a glass full of pink gin and ice.
“I’d offer you one,” he said, “but in your condition …” Then he took a long, greedy drink of the gin and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “That’s why I like working up here on the ridge,” he said. “Great booze. Hard to get the good stuff down there.”
“O.K., Doctor,” Wilson said.
The doctor nodded, finished off the glass, and set it on the inlaid table. “You are recovering from a case of dengue fever, of a particularly virulent type common to equatorial regions of Africa. The natives call it ka-dinge pwepe, literally the stiff knees, because the fever attacks your knees, and for a while afterward you walk around like a mechanical man. This type of dengue—which I call Dengue Boursaly, after myself—seems to be unique to this miserable island, in that unlike continental types of the disease, which is caused by bacteria, this type appears to be viral. And it can act on the nervous system in the latter stages if not checked with the proper combination of diuretics and antibiotics, which is also very unusual. I would write a paper for the medical journals on the subject but”—the doctor gave a Gallic shrug—“I am a prisoner here, and they do not allow me to publish.”
Wilson focused on the ceiling, taking this in. “How long have I been out?” he said at last.
“About three and a half weeks,” Dr. Boursaly said. “You were absolutely raving when they first brought you up. Now you’re as good as on your feet again, thank God. Otherwise, it would have meant my head.”
Wilson started to smile; then he realized the doctor wasn’t kidding.
“Not really …” Wilson said.
Dr. Boursaly picked up the empty glass, stared at the melting ice cubes for a second, and put it down again with a sigh. “Your Mistress Page was very clear about the matter. She went off on a raid with her father—last chance before the rainy season, you know—and she left you in my care. If you are not well by the time she returns, she told me, ouf”—he drew his hand across his neck—“it’s my head on a stick. And that’s no bloody joke. Old Dr. Raimee misdiagnosed a malignant tumor; you know what they did to him?”
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