The Pirate's Daughter (29 page)

“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. Just 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.”

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 was 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.

Wilson came down the length of the balcony, his mind working. At that moment a big military truck rumbled up the avenue and stopped at the curb in front of the mansion, brakes squealing. Thirty or so soldiers climbed down off the back and ambled up the front steps.

“Changing of the guards,” the soldier said. “I'm off duty now for the evening.”

Wilson took a cigarette as if he didn't know what to do with it. The soldier held up a match, and in the brief flare Wilson recognized the face but couldn't say where he knew it from. The Egyptian cigarette tasted harsh and bitter as seaweed, and he drew it into his lungs.

“I have been waiting for an opportunity to speak to you,” the soldier said. “I was with those who took you up from the Nikongi Jetty.”

“I thought you looked familiar,” Wilson said.

“You do not remember me from before tonight?” the soldier said.

“Before tonight?” Wilson said, and felt the prickling sensation at the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”

“You do not remember me,” the soldier said. “That is very funny,” and he laughed and Wilson remembered the laugh but still did not know the man.

“I give up,” Wilson said.

The soldier raised his left hand suddenly, and Wilson saw its outline against the dull red illumination of Rigala under fire. The three middle fingers were missing, the stub of the third digit decorated with a gaudy ring of gold openwork. Wilson's memory came on like a slow-moving train. It was an astonishing encounter, but he had come to think of the world as a place in which astonishing things happened every day. Now he remembered the man from the night of the cockfight and the bright stars.

“Your name is Tulj,” he said in a calm voice. “Am I right?”

“And your name is Wilson, and you saved my life!” Tulj reached out and took Wilson by the shoulder, excited. “You did more than that. You gave my life back to me, and you saved my brother's life! I didn't have time to thank you then. I was a coward. This has been my one great shame. Later I looked for you, and I could not find you, to my despair. Now God has given you back to me, and I rejoice! But you are in the company of very evil men, men who make slaves of my people. I have been told evil men can do good things, but I do not believe it. Are you an evil man?”

“I don't think so,” Wilson said.

“Then we must talk.”

“O.K.”

Tulj took Wilson by the arm again and led him down through the house. Soldiers milled about in the entrance hall, chewing kaf, drinking tejiyaa. Others replaced the ones who had been asleep on the stairs. The sentry did not seem to notice as the two of them went out the gate to the cab of the truck.

“Get in, Mr. Wilson,” Tulj said.

“Just plain Wilson,” Wilson said. “It's my first name.”

They got in the truck, and Tulj said a few quick words to the driver and handed him four cigarettes. The driver shrugged and
nodded, and a few minutes later the truck filled up again with soldiers and they lurched off down the avenue into the night.

“They go to the fighting in the Seventh District,” Tulj said, jerking his thumb toward the soldiers through the little mesh window in the back. “Lugluwanougu Street, that's the front these days. I used to buy tires for my bicycle there when I was a student at the University. Last week the front was the garden of what used to be the Sequhue National Library. Seventy-five men died in the fighting between the stone benches.”

“Who are you serving with?” Wilson said.