The Pirate's Daughter by Robert Girardi

placing bets at certain tracks, stock certificates issued by companies long since bankrupt—but there had also been a handful of silver foreign coins and a fancy box of imported cigars. These had been the extent of his patrimony, fifty hand-rolled Coronado Supremos, each sealed with wax in airtight glass tubes. He had smoked them slowly over the years, always lighting up at four forty-five exactly in honor of his father, at one of the outdoor cafés in Buptown or the Bend. Now just one cigar remained, nestled in its tube with his spare socks at the bottom of the closet in his apartment back home.
    Wilson told the captain about the inherited Coronados with the theatrical gesticulations that cigars often seem to inspire in the amateur smoker. “When I get home again, and who knows how long that will be,” Wilson said, waving his cigar in a rueful arc, “I’ll buy a glass of the sixty-five-dollar Armagnac on the patio at the Cat and Cradle, and I’ll smoke that last cigar very, very slowly.”
    The captain’s cigar showed a steady glowing coal in the darkness. “At least you got something from your father,” he said. “I never got anything from mine but a kick in the ass. My old man was a bishop of the Reformed Lutheran Danish Church. You weren’t arguing with him, you know; you were arguing with God. When I was twelve, I ran off to Copenhagen and took ship for Africa. The sea receives all kinds of orphans, mister.”
    The captain was from a small fishing village on the bleak Frisian coast of Denmark, where it rains most of the year. When the sun comes out, the people weep, get drunk, make love to their neighbors’ wives, dance naked in the streets. The beauty of sunny days is too much for them; they go slightly mad until the rain comes back again. The captain had served on American vessels for thirty years;his English was perfect, bore no trace of the gray, rockbound coasts of his youth.
    â€œAmundsen,” Wilson said. “Any relation to the man who beat Scott to the pole?”
    â€œNone,” the captain said. “A bunch of pasty-faced churchmen in my family for generations. I’m the first in a hundred fifty years to get some wind in my hair.”
    The sky above the sails brightened. A dull purple grew on the horizon, and the running lights began to dim. A button on the navigational console blinked on and off three times. Captain Amundsen threw up his hands.
    â€œThese damn computers,” he said. “They tell me dawn is coming as if I couldn’t see it for myself.” He stood, made some quick adjustments, and turned to Wilson. “You’d better get below. Get some sleep. It’ll start soon enough.”
    Just as Wilson reached the hatchway, the wind picked up and the sails spread themselves above like wings, and in that breathy silence peculiar to wind and sail, the vessel heeled in a straight run toward morning.

7
    The
Compound Interest
was temporary home to four human beings and a rumor, Dwight Ackerman. Wilson spent hours every morning toiling beneath the iron thumb of a diminutive Vietnamese cook named Nguyen, but the man they cooked for didn’t seem to exist outside the prodigious appetite that made Wilson’s presence on the ship necessary.
    They fed their invisible master like a wild animal in the zoo. Once a day, a little after noon, Nguyen delivered a massive tray of food into the mouth of Ackerman’s cave—the forward suite of stateroomand office from which the billionaire never emerged. The plates came back an hour later, licked clean. Wilson pictured a freak the size of a house stuffed into the bow of the ship, a behemoth wearing a polo shirt big as a tent, arms like joints of ham. Or nothing, a devouring void.
    The routine was always the same. Wilson rose bleary-eyed at 5:00 A.M . and stumbled through the gloom to the galley. Still half asleep, he attempted to decipher instructions written in yellow