They followed the shell drive that made up the single road of the ridge settlement, past the homes of the Thirty Captains set back among the tamarinds. Wilson had never seen anyone pass along here, and with a few exceptions the white houses were shuttered and closed.
“They’re all in London or Miami or somewhere this time of year,” Cricket said. “It’s only hardworking old Dad who pulls a raid going into the rainy season.”
The rain poured buckets and then let up for a bit. A few cars stood under canvas covers along the drive; Wilson recognized the familiar silhouette of a Mercedes-Benz. A big tabby cat crouched underneath it, just behind the front wheels. Cricket made a plaintive mewing sound; the cat mewed back but would not venture out across the wet shell gravel.
“That’s Petey,” Cricket said. “Used to be the ship’s cat aboard the Esperance, Evan Matthews’s tub. He’s another Palmetto scrub like Dad. Matthews ran into an Argentine coast guard cutter off the Maldives awhile back. The cutter went down after a pretty hairy fight, but so did the Esperance. Captain Matthews and Petey for breakfast and two other sailors—all that was left of the crew—floated around in a rubber raft for a week, and were just about to eat poor Petey before they were picked up. When they got back here, Captain Matthews retired him, but you know, I think that cat misses the life of a pirate.”
Cricket and Wilson walked on in silence, and the shell drive became a rutted trail that wound up the ridge through a thicket of scrub and brush grass and into a patch of jungle that was like going into a long green tunnel. They folded their umbrellas. The heavy-leaved trees protected them from the rain. Small orange monkeys scuttled about in the green dimness; black-scaled lizards ran up the rough bark. A quarter mile further on, the trail passed out into an open space along the ridge, a rocky outcropping that faced the interior of the island.
Wilson had never been this far up, and he was surprised by what he saw below. The ridge sloped down to a jungle-covered valley that gave way to open, cultivated land about three miles off. There were rice paddies and orchards full of mangoes and banana trees, rich black squares of fallow earth, carefully tended stone walls. A straight road led to a massive-looking country house of ancient stone. Wilson’s fix on architecture was vague, but he put the building at fifteenth- or sixteenth-century Spanish or Portuguese, probably the fortified residence of some long-gone colonial governor. Nicely tended green lawns led down to a reflecting pool and the clipped hedge cones of a classical garden. Wilson did not need to be told who owned this estate, but Cricket squeezed his hand and told him anyway.
“That’s the Portugee’s place,” she said, “Villa Real. His people have lived down there for over four hundred years. At one time, they supplied nearly all the slaves for plantations in the New World. The king of Portugal gave this island as a gift to one of his ancestors, the first white man to sail around the bulge of Africa and live to tell the tale—”
“Yes, Gil Eannes was his name,” Wilson said.
“That’s right,” Cricket said, surprised. “How did you know that?”
“I’m not sure,” Wilson said uneasily, and at that moment he didn’t.
“In any case, the Portugee is one of our problems,” Cricket said. “My father is another one of our problems.”
They went back up the trail into the trees. Then Cricket turned to the left and led Wilson through the underbrush. About twenty yards off the trail a large banyan tree spread its leaves down to the ground, forming a sort of waterproof cave. On the ground beneath the leaves, someone had spread one of the oriental rugs from the house and set a silver tray with two crystal glasses and a bottle of champagne on ice not yet completely melted.
“Very slick,” Wilson said. “I think I’ve been set up.”
Cricket grinned and kissed him. They sat down on the rug and took off their rain ponchos, and there was the heavy root smell of jungle earth and the sad rustling of the monkeys in the trees. Cricket opened the bottle of champagne. The cork popped off and shot into the leaves, an incongruously civilized sound in the wet hushing of the jungle. She filled a glass, handed it to Wilson. “Champagne?” she said.
Wilson knew less about champagne than he knew about architecture, but after one sip he took a shot and put the stuff at five hundred dollars a bottle.
“Should we have a toast?” Cricket said.
“I suppose so,” Wilson said.
Cricket hesitated. Then her smile faded, and she drank down her glass in one nervous swallow. “Look at me, Wilson.” Her voice was serious.
Wilson looked up. Her eyes matched the green of the jungle, but with some darker shade roiling in the surface.
“This is my way of proposing,” she said. “If you want to stay alive, you’ll have to marry me.”
Wilson didn’t know what to say. An orange monkey peered down at him through the leaves. Its wizened face looked like the face of an old man. This was one of the strangest moments in his life.
“Marriage is the only way out, sweet,” Cricket said softly, “otherwise they will kill you.” She reached for his hand and pressed it to her face and addressed the rest of her speech to his knuckles. “Under the Articles, you are my slave, a piece of property. A slave has no rights here. If someone kills your slave, you’ve got to be compensated, of course, but it’s only a question of money. Now a husband, that’s very different. That means you’re part of the family, one of the Company of the Thirty Captains. Protected by the full authority of the Articles, do you see?”
Wilson pulled away and folded his arms across his chest. “Not really,” he said quietly. “Why don’t you tell me the whole story this time?”
Four glasses of champagne later Cricket took a deep breath and was ready to begin.
“I’m going to give you a little bit of background first,” she said. “When I was a kid, the economy of the Palmettos was based entirely on gambling, and everyone did pretty well by it. Then organized crime got involved, and there were a couple of very public murders on Outer Key, and in ’76 the Alabama legislature outlawed our high-stakes poker games for good. About three thousand people were put out of work just like that and needed to find another way to make a living. For hundreds of years before gambling got big in the 1920s, Palmetto Scrubs like Dad had always looked to the sea—we live on a bunch of islands, right? Hell, the place was first settled by buccaneers under the famous Elzevir Montague, who is a direct ancestor of mine. So, back to the sea we went.
“Dad had enough in his savings to buy the Storm Car off the Costa Rican Navy, and he started going after expensive yachts in the Caribbean and tramps full of dope coming out of South America. Other guys did the same thing. They formed a loose confederation, just like in the bad old pirate days, and called it the Brotherhood of the Coast. Over the next five years, the Brotherhood disappeared about two hundred boats. Blame it on the Bermuda Triangle—that was the big joke then, and it was even funnier that a lot of people in the news media actually did blame it on stuff like magnetic whirlpools and UFOs.
“Meanwhile, right around this time, the civil war in Bupanda was just starting to heat up. A few enterprising Lebanese ship owners were buying Bupu POWs off the Andas and Anda POWs off the Bupus and selling them to the Arabs along the Red Sea. Dad was one of the first on our side of the pond to figure the real potential there. He set up a barracoon at Grand Terre, which is a fly speck of an island just northwest of the Palmetto Passage, recruited thirty captains out of the Brotherhood, and headed out for Africa.
“Everyone started making a ton of money almost immediately. Second year of operation, Dad sold two hundred Bupus to Dominion Sugar to work their cane fields in Guyana for something like a quarter of a million bucks. But one night, during a hurricane, six of the Bupus got loose. One who could speak English eventually made it to Jamaica, and rumors trickled back to the States. Then the coast guard started to sniff around, and all of a sudden the Palmetto setup just wasn’t going to work anymore, so Dad started to look for another home base for the Bupanda trade. That’s when the Portugee came over and proposed a little private high-stakes card game just between him and Dad. If Dad won, he could bring the slave trade to Quatre Sables and turn it into a big-time operation and run the show, with no percentage off the top. If the Portugee won, Dad could still come out to Quatre Sables, but the Portugee would run the show with a twenty-five percent straight cut off the top, and one other little thing. Call it an added bonus—”
Cricket paused to swig a mouthful of champagne straight out of the bottle. She topped up Wilson’s glass, spilling some over the side. When she drank again, Wilson heard the bottle chatter against her teeth. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and went on in a shaky voice.
“The Portugee is a real gambler; he’s addicted to gambling in the way that other people are addicted to drugs or booze. I told you a few things about him before, but not the whole truth. I’ve known the man since I was a little girl. He used to play in Johnny Mazep’s poker games in the old days and stayed with us off and on in the big house in St. George, and I guess I used to flirt with him in the way that little girls do. He seemed so fine with his perfect white suits and his swishy European manners. Then, one day, when I was about eleven, he drove me out to Capstan Head for a picnic—he had this white Mercedes limousine with a chauffeur that he always brought over from Miami on the ferry—and on the way back he pulled down my sundress and put his hands all over my chest and between my legs and took his dick out and his face got all red, and he started jerking off. I screamed, but the chauffeur didn’t even turn around. When he was done, he cleaned me up and told me to stop crying and acted as if nothing had happened. I didn’t say anything about the incident to my mom, because I was terrified and I felt guilty and I didn’t know if I had done something to cause the Portugee to act that way. I put the whole thing in the back of my mind where you put the bad stuff, and I tried to forget about it.
“Five years later, the night the Portugee played his private card game with Dad, I had just come back from a dance at Palmetto High, where I had gotten stoned and fucked some greaser in the backseat of his car. It was about three in the morning, I was listening to Foghat on my headphones and getting undressed, and I didn’t hear the Portugee come into my bedroom. He pushed me down on the bed, put a pillow over my face, and raped me. Then, he took the pillow off my face and told me not to be scared, and he raped me again. I wasn’t a virgin, but it was horrible. At one point I looked up and saw Dad standing in the doorway, watching and taking hits off a bottle of bourbon.
“The Portugee raped me one more time in the morning before he left. About ten A.M. Dad heard me crying and came in and told me that he had lost me to the Portugee in a poker game, that I was no longer his daughter, that I belonged to the Portugee now just like a slave and that I had no choice in the matter. I cried and cried, but my mother was dead by then, and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t fight it. How could I? I couldn’t run away again. Every time I ran away I just ended up fucking somebody for a place to stay, for a decent meal. You know what happens to naive young girls on the streets. What was the point? So a week later, I shipped out on the Portugee’s ship, the Jesus of Lubeck. I told you about that. The only part I left out was that he fucked me from noon till night the whole time, used me like a convict. I’ve been his woman ever since then. The man is obsessed with me. Whenever I try to leave him, he finds me, brings me back. He’s done that twice. The only life I know is the sea, I don’t know how to do anything else, and he’s got connections in shipping companies all over the world.
“There’s just one way to escape the Portugee for good. I need a good gambler. You’re sweet and smart, and you’re a good gambler, right, Wilson? The minute you walked into Nancy’s shop, I knew there was something about you. I was attracted to you right away, and when you told me that your father had been a professional gambler, the wheels started turning. Right then and there I dreamed up the whole scheme to take you away with me.”
“Cricket—”
“No, let me finish. Every time I come home to Quatre Sables, I go stay at Villa Real for a few days and the Portugee fucks me. It’s not great, but I’m used to it. I was even sort of content with my life until you came along. It wasn’t so bad. Plenty of action on board one ship or the next, and I’m on my own most of the year, so if I have a fling in some distant corner of the world, who will know? But now the Portugee’s on this kick where he wants to marry me. I’ve been able to put him off for the past two years, but he doesn’t want to wait any longer, and he’s serious. Says he’s getting old, says he wants to settle down, have kids to take over that damned pile of old stones in the valley. Listen, Wilson, this Ackerman thing is my first real operation as a full partner. I have a legitimate share in the profits under the Articles. Until now, it’s been pocket change—ten thousand here, twenty there. But when that rich bastard finally coughs up, we’re talking about millions! Enough money to get away and live for the rest of our lives! I mean anywhere, Europe, South America, you name it. We can live like normal people! We can have a house together and who knows, and we—”
Cricket’s voice cracked. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands and began to sob in loud, jerky spasms. Wilson felt embarrassed, didn’t know what to do. He wanted to tell her that he didn’t trust her, that he couldn’t live off the earnings of piracy and murder and slavery, that you could never base your own happiness on the sufferings of others. In the end, he finished by doing what men of feeling have always done when faced with a desperate woman in tears. He took her in his arms and held her close and offered what comfort he could.