The Pirate's Daughter by Robert Girardi

Author:Robert Girardi [Girardi, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-48955-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-18T04:00:00+00:00

8

Three nights later, Dr. Boursaly barged into the bathroom of the house on the ridge as Wilson took a cool bath in the big marble tub. The doctor’s eyes were wild and excited, his clothes in disarray. As usual he reeked of alcohol.

“Don’t you knock?” Wilson said.

“I couldn’t,” Dr. Boursaly said. “There are no doors in this place. Dry off and put on your clothes. Something I want you to see.”

“We’re going out?”

“Yes.”

Wilson had never been through the shanty city on foot after dark, had in fact been warned against it by the doctor himself. “Isn’t it a little dangerous?” he said.

The doctor waved a dismissive hand. “With all the infectious microbes floating in the air here, even breathing is dangerous.”

They walked down through the rustling, shadowy streets to the barracoon. When they came through the barbed wire into the compound, Wilson saw an unusual sort of activity around the concrete hangars where the slaves were kept. Men in business suits milled about the entrance or stood talking in subdued groups of three or four. The great wooden doors were open, harsh white light spilling from within. Floods lit the bare cinder blocks. Wilson heard the sputter and burp of generators and caught the sharp reek of gasoline in the air.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“It’s the night of the big dance,” Dr. Boursaly said. “I’m the doctor on call in case anyone breaks an ankle.”

Inside the hangar spotlights shone down from the rafters, and the air smelled of sweat and wax and disinfectant, very much like a high school gym. Bleachers rose up one wall over a polished wooden platform about half the size of a basketball court. Wilson and the doctor took a seat at the corner of the bleachers in the front row and waited. Soon an evil odor, half submerged beneath the disinfectant, announced itself to Wilson’s nose.

“They’re moving up from the pens,” the doctor said. “You can smell them coming. Clean the place from top to bottom, spray it with heavy chemicals, still won’t get that stench out. If I believed in God, I’d say the whole island stinks to high heaven.”

After a few minutes, the bleachers began to fill. Wilson turned and looked back at the crowd and saw clean-shaven white faces hanging like half-moons above crisp white shirts and power ties; Japanese executives hunched over calculators; Arab merchants dressed in Savile Row elegance, diamond rings flashing from their fingers. And he heard the hushed, self-important mutter of the universal language in which business is done.

Soon, the first lot came up for sale: ten young Bupu men chained together from the neck and ankles, stainless steel links gleaming like coins in the white light. Sitting barely thirty feet away, Wilson could see the despair in the eyes of these young Africans, could smell the raw fear lift off their skin in waves. The second one from the end dropped to his knees suddenly and began to call on his God in a loud, hysterical shrieking but was whipped to his feet again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.