The Perfidious Parrot

by Janwillem Van De Wetering

  Karate’s indignation interfered with his breathing. He became red in the face. De Gier had to slap the little man’s cheeks to bring him to reason.

  “Rest,” de Gier said. “Set your alarm so that you can meet Ketchup’s plane. Remember to pay for this hotel suite yourselves. A mere thousand a day. Small change for you carpetbaggers.”

  “And where will you be when we get all this going?” Karate asked.

  “Around,” de Gier said, “around and around. Not to worry.”

  “And how do we know what happens in the end?”

  De Gier promised that he, at a future meeting, probably in the billiards-café of the stripping lady in Amsterdam, would report in detail, submitting newspaper cuttings, for there might be a few.

  “Will be a few,” Karate laughed. “This should indeed hit the papers. Leave it to us, Mr. Former Sergeant, sir. Hahaha.”

  Former Special Forces Specialist Michael C. Donegan, presently self-employed, promised himself that, starting probably today, he would go easy on his daily intake of alcohol. Two wake-up demons were too many wake-up demons. He was used to facing one hangover demon. Mickey could ignore it. He would just swing his long legs off the orange-crate bed in the plywood camper parked on the worst corner lot of the Williams Street Trailer Park, and simply walk through the apparently solid image. The demon always just stood there. Sometimes it was in drag, pretending to be Mickey’s deceased mother, sometimes it amused itself by being a zombie with the body of a human corpse and the head of a parrot. On mornings following official holidays it might resemble a regular devil, complete with horns and fangs, waving a red hot poker. One wake-up demon was nothing special. It might follow him outside but would waft away if hit by spray from Mickey’s shower-head, attached to a garden hose dangling from a fig tree’s air root. Or maybe it was the light that made the hangover demon fade. Once the demon was dealt with Mickey was free to figure out some scheme to provide himself with beer money. The hangover demon was irritating but could be dealt with, but now there were two demons, and he couldn’t walk through them. He had tried but they pushed him back on the bed, gently, while politely addressing him in some European version of English. The Euro-speak sounded as if its practitioners had flies stuck in their throats and were trying to get rid of the bothersome insects. “Chchchch-chuh, how are you doing, Mickey?”

  “Hey!” Mickey said.

  “Beer?” one demon asked. It offered a cold can of Heineken. It seemed to say “Heineken” too but the vowels were all wrong and it snarled as it pronounced them, showing its upper teeth as a dog will do when it welcomes its master after mistaking him for an intruder. A friendly embarrassed snarl.

  The other demon was smiling too, offering another tasty can, rivulets of thawing dew running down its gleaming sides. “Proast,” the other demon said.

  Mickey, sipping from the can, peering through a dirty window, saw an orange glow through the twisted fig tree’s roots outside. Sunrise? Demons double in the early morning, but the window faced west. Maybe the intruders were regularly human. Repo men? But he owed no money on his car and owned nothing else. He realized he had slept all day. Pictures put themselves together in his slowly booting-up brain. Nasty Nick. Female chests. Nasty Nick’s partner, Bad Baldy. Showing Mickey the door. Things hadn’t gone too well. He focused on his visitors, who were filling up most of the spare room in the tiny camper. Two almost identical short men in clean jeans, polished half-high boots, ironed shirts, new-looking baseball hats with the same text (“Sounds like bullshit to me”) were smiling and emitting the weird sounding vowels that were part of their speech. Mickey got up slowly, smiling too, as if welcoming the unknown parties. He touched one. Yes. Solid.

  “Hi,” one visitor said. “You are Mickey? Show us girlie bar? Hello? Eat somezing first? Stone kreps?”

  “Fried fishes?” the other visitor asked. “Squid soup?”

  Mickey, although mostly living on alcohol now, still ate sometimes and seafood seemed like a good idea. “Who …” he croaked, rubbing his throat, “… are you?”

  “Vriends,” both short men said simultaneously. They introduced themselves. Cornelius offered a cigarette protruding from a crumpled blue pack. “French, very koot.” Fernandus flicked his lighter.

  Mickey inhaled deeply, then coughed. His friends patted his back affectionately. The sudden and powerful intake of nicotine cleared Mickey’s brain. Mickey sucked more smoke from the black smoldering tobacco. “Yes, good.” He put on his jeans and T-shirt. “You do have money, have you?”

  “Plentie of munnie,” Cornelius said. “We haf,” Fernandus said. They showed handfuls of bills, twenties and fifties. “Enuf?”

  Mickey thought so. Taking a cold shower outside helped to clear his brain further. It produced a theory that would explain the two little men who were now sitting on the steps of the camper, slapping at mosquitos, blowing smoke at flies. “You’re from a ship?” Mickey asked. “Crew? Someone gave you my name and address? I’m to be your guide?”

  “Sure,” Cornelius said, smiling. “Datsit,” Fernandus said, “cruise ship. The Statendam.”

  “Pursers,” Cornelius said. “Smuggled dope. Made munnie. Now spend it. You show where. Girlies.”

  “First eat fishes,” Fernandus said.

  The three ate in a garden restaurant, specializing in seafood, off Whitehead Street. No liquor was served but Cornelius and Fernandus had dropped six-packs into Mickey’s trunk and now retrieved them. Broiled fresh snapper came within an oval of lemon slices, stone crab was served with its own hot sauce, the frozen lemon pie with freshly whipped cream. “Ahhhhh,” the foreigners kept saying, “Koot.” They also kept raising their cans. “Proast.”

  “Proast,” Mickey toasted. This was all all right. Lady Luck had shown up again to repay him for expert services rendered. His tolerance for alcohol had gone down steeply lately and even though he hadn’t had more than four of five beers Mickey was drunk. He was telling his sympathetic hosts about the beautiful and pure Christina, who had once shared his camper. How this good woman had been seduced by the island’s worst pimp. How Nasty Nick made the innocent Christina work in a bad place, The Perfidious Parrot. How he couldn’t visit Christina there anymore. His audience listened spellbound. “Main Chott,” Cornelius growled. Fernandus merely gasped. How could such injustice be? It could, Mickey assured them. Mickey picked a frangipani flower off a bush next to his chair, compared the white flower to his beloved Christina, made his hosts smell her subtle fragrance, then scowled, then crushed the flower. “Nasty Nick did that.”

  “Say no more,” the avenging spirits told their protegée. They paid the bill, leaving the smiling waitress with a large tip. They hopped into Mickey’s car. The chariot, with Mickey at the wheel, roared off.

  Not ten minutes later, after speeding through red lights, across sidewalks, parks and parking lots, careening on the wrong sides of streets, its horn blaring, its driver and passengers shouting, the Chevy had traversed the city, and slid sideways across The Perfidious Parrot’s parking lot, where it braked abruptly. Doorman Nasty Nick was hit by a shower of crushed oyster shells, plowed up by the Chevy’s wheels.

  “That’s him?” Karate asked Mickey.

  “He’s mine,” Mickey screamed but the two Dutchmen, standing on the car’s back seat had jumped out of the car and assaulted their temporarily blinded opponent before Mickey had even opened his door. Karate went for Nick’s head, Ketchup for Nick’s knees. The victim had been a semiprofessional boxer and was ready to throw some punches but his attention was distracted by a new threat looming up. A tall hooded human shape, riding a pink bicycle, entered the scene via a sidewalk and now circled Nick. De Gier, wearing a black cape with glowing bones painted on it, pulled off his hood. A skull grinned, deep-set red eyes glowed from ivory sockets.

  “What …?” Nasty Nick screamed before Karate hit him on the temple and Ketchup pummeled him under the belt. Mickey, professionally trained to take pleasure in painful destruction, kicked
Nick between the legs.

  Mickey, delirious with alcohol and rage, took the cyclist for his own wake-up demon, arriving late. He waved at the spook and ran inside, following his mates who had already rushed into the nightclub’s hall. Bad Baldy, Nasty Nick’s partner, a huge man, backed by a muscular wide-shouldered bouncer, blocked the way. Baldy was about to reach for a shotgun hidden behind a counter. Ketchup whistled on his fingers and Karate pointed at something above Baldy’s head. The big man looked at the hall’s ceiling. Ketchup jumped and slid across the counter, swiveling as he moved. His feet kicked Bad Baldy in the belly. Baldy slumped forward. Mickey’s clasped hands thumped Baldy’s shaven skull. Karate grabbed the shotgun, hit the remaining bouncer on the chin with its butt, aimed the weapon at the ceiling and fired both barrels. Then the three attackers invaded the main room. The DJ, another big man, joined the melee while the raucous rock music kept playing and women kept stripping and contorting their bodies. Some clients joined the intruders, others chose to assist the DJ. Baldy reappeared. Mickey caught a flying chair and broke it on the big man’s head. Baldy went down again.

  “CHRISTINA!” Mickey shouted. The name became a battle-cry. Christina, a petite redhead who was trying to leave through a broken window, was pulled back by the legs by Mickey. She had no desire to be saved but was picked up anyway, bundled in a torn-down curtain and carried outside. A falling candle set a tablecloth on fire and soon flames were licking at the walls, igniting wooden furniture, crackling along the seams between dry floor boards.

  While the building burned Ketchup and Karate made sure the still defensive Christina was tied up in Mickey’s backseat. Passing cars, attracted by the fire, drove onto the parking lot. Other cars were frantically trying to leave. Sirens were heard in the distance. Ketchup and Karate directed traffic so that the Chevy could get away. The two little men stepped into shadows and disappeared. The spooky cyclist was long gone.

  * * *

  Newspaper cuttings, faxed by Sergeant Ramona Symonds to Rinus de Gier c/o The Old Rum House in St. Eustatius, Netherlands Antilles:

  Cutting # 1 (Key West Police Daily Report)

  Today, 3.30 A.M., a white male known as Michael C. Donegan (33), residing in Camper # 3, William Street Trailer Park, unemployed, was arrested by me, Policeman Albert B. Paton, (strained wrist, medical report attached), driving patrol car 1, with the help of colleagues driving patrol cars 7 and 3, respectively Samuel “Piggy” Jones (broken eyeglasses, damage report attached), and Carl Opken (dislocated shoulder, medical report attached), at the crossing of White Street and Truman Avenue where his vehicle hit a tree. Subject appeared to be inebriated (slurred speech, unsteady gait, strong smell of alcohol). Subject refused breath test. Subject resisted arrest. After being handcuffed, Subject kicked and broke a side window of patrol car 1 (damage report attached). Subject was accompanied by Christina “Chesty” Fetcher (26), residing at the Happy End Motel (Terry Lane). Fetcher is an exotic dancer performing at The Perfidious Parrot striptease bar (Greene & Williams Streets) who accused subject of kidnapping and assault (signed and witnessed complaint attached). After my arrival at Simonton Precinct, dispatcher J. Dembska reported a telephone call by Nicholas “Nasty” Silsby, doorman and part proprietor at/of aforementioned strip-bar, clocked at 3.20 A.M. Silsby told Dembska that aforementioned Michael Donegan, recently barred from The Perfidious Parrot, forced entry into the strip-bar, and assaulted him, Silsby, and kidnapped the aforementioned Christina C. Fetcher. Donegan was assisted by two unknown subjects. The three of them, allegedly, also set fire to the building housing The Perfidious Parrot. Subject Donegan, pending further investigation, is being held at the Simonton Street Precinct. His two accessories were not apprehended. Silsby described subjects as white males, 30+, small of stature, who spoke German.

  Newspaper cutting 2

  (Miami Daily Messenger)

  VIOLENCE IN KEY WEST

  An escaped prisoner was shot to death last night in Key West. Michael “Mickey” C. Donegan (31), being held on suspicion of assault on a nightclub doorman, kidnapping of an exotic dancer, arson, DWI, avoiding arrest, resisting arrest and assault on three policemen, managed, last night, to climb a twenty foot brick wall behind the Simonton Street Jail in Key West. Warden Tim Jones stated that Donegan had asked him for cigarettes but was informed that the jail had been declared “smoke free” recently. Donegan, the warden said, thereupon announced that he would obtain his nicotine “some other way.” No one suspected that the prisoner would be able to scale a twenty foot wall topped by a roll of barbed wire. The prisoner was, however, a former Green Beret, and had been decorated in the Gulf War. The jail’s wall had previously been repaired leaving small projecting wires in the plaster. Donegan used the projections to support his bare toes and rolled across the barbed wire on top of the wall. The prisoner, dressed in bright orange jail garb, jogging along, reached Fleming Street. The warden had meanwhile alerted all police patrols in the city. A bicycle constable ordered the fugitive to stop. Donegan shouted that he was on his way to get cigarettes at Fausto Supermarket and would return soon. At that moment a shot was fired and Donegan dropped to the pavement. According to the witnesses the policeman had not drawn his gun. The identity of the killer is, as yet, unknown. Only one shot was fired. It may have been a drive-by shooting. The bullet hit Donegan in the heart. Military precision?

  23

  BOUNTY HUNTERS

  St. Eustatius, one of the three northern Netherlands Antilles, is barely six miles long and two miles across. Facing Oranjestad, St. Eustatius’s capital and port, a hamlet with some few hundred inhabitants, the Admiraal Rodney had dropped her anchor and swayed quietly on a calm sea.

  Grijpstra and Carl Ambagt, aboard the Rodney’s sloop, were being rowed ashore. De Gier waved at them from the balcony of his second story hotel room. The Old Rum House, built centuries ago from the island’s sandstone and local lumber, topped by roofs of imported Dutch tiles, stood on a cliff commanding views of the ocean and neighboring islands. The commissaris and the skipper watched what was going on from the Rodney’s sundeck. Ambagt Senior was on his second sherry (“Laying out my daily schedule in an orderly fashion,” he had just said), the commissaris was on his first double espresso. The skipper was spilling sherry on a freshly laundered admiral’s uniform, the commissaris’s shantung suit was crumpled from its many ocean splashings. A folded face towel placed inside his pith helmet by the ever-thoughtful servant kept it from sagging over the commissaris’s eyes.

  “Looks like a little bit of heaven,” the commissaris said, pointing his cane at St. Eustatius.

  Skipper Peter snorted. “For rugheads only.” His hand swept in a halfcircle indicating the entire crescent of the Antilles. “You know what is out here? Nothing but nasty niggers.” The skipper looked at the island morosely. “There, on ‘Statia’ as they call it, is a hotel on the other side, called Beachcastle or somesuch. Me and Carl stayed there some years back and we were robbed.”

  “By black people?” The commissaris shook his head. “How unfortunate. At gun point?”

  “Burglars,” Skipper Peter barked.

  “You caught the criminals in the act?”

  Skipper Peter said he had not, but his luggage was stolen.

  The commissaris looked stern. “So how do you know the culprits were black?”

  Ambagt Senior grimaced. “Carl and I had been out for a walk, or been trying to. There is a lot of litter piled up on the beach here. We were worn out by having to step over broken buckets, torn ropes, bottles and what have you and were looking forward to a rest, but back in our room all our clothes and gear were gone.” Skipper Peter mimed the sad surprise of that fateful moment. “Your stuff is gone. You ever had that happen to you? Makes you feel naked?”

  The commissaris said yes. Luggage fails to arrive at airports. Kind of pleasant. You don’t have to carry what isn’t there. Lightening of the daily load. Less to worry about.

  “Yes,” Ambagt Senior said sadly. “Worry. Mos
t annoying. Objects change into empty space. Nothing to hold on to. But they had left us something, my new camera, a thirty-five millimeter Nikon. The damn thing sat there, staring at us from the table.”

  “Your burglars had no interest in photography?” the commissaris suggested.

  “Not that so much,” the skipper said. “There was film in the camera which I had developed much later. There were our own snapshots and two clear pictures of big black backsides.”

  “You think that is funny?” Skipper Peter asked.

  The commissaris excused his sudden hooting. He pointed at a small mountain with a jagged peak on the south side of the island. “A volcano? Active, you think?”

  “Dormant,” Ambagt Senior said. “But the Antilles are treacherous, you can’t count on anything. Same with the natives. And to think we set them such good examples.” He carefully felt his nose which looked more swollen than usual. “Do you know that St. Eustatius used to be known as the ‘Golden Rock’? Dutch merchants used to make big bucks here.”

  The commissaris showed interest. “Two hundred years ago, up to fifty ocean-going ships a day used to anchor here,” he was told. “Benjamin Franklin himself kept a mailbox on St. Eustatius.”

  “Here, eh?” The commissaris contemplated the silent inactivity ashore. A mini volcano to the south, a narrow valley straight ahead, five molehills to the north. Behind the narrow beach a bit of a boulevard with a few trees here and there, vainly trying to cover up a dull dry yellow inland. The village consisted of crumbling walls and some sagging tiled roofs. There were no other ships in sight. Oranjestad reached into the water with a single short pier, a few hundred feet long. At the far left end of the island there was a far more imposing structure built out into the ocean, a giant quay where two supertankers were being pumped dry of their cargo. Between the low hills large aluminum storage tanks gleamed.