We Are Pirates: A Novel (17 page)

“Is that so?” said one of them.

“That is so,” Steed said. “Tell them, Needle.”

“I’m giving out ass whoopings and lollipops,” Phil Needle said, as heartily as he could muster, “and I’m fresh out of lollipops.”

The men roared, calamitous in the echoey room. One man pointed a tut-tutting finger, shaky like a nervous gun. “First thing in the morning, Phil Needle,” he said. “Maybe you should go to bed.”

“Fuck you,” one of them said. “Get yourself a fucking beverage, Needle!”

“The good stuff,” Leonard Steed said, and lifted a bottle like a magic trick, a decanter half-empty, or, Phil Needle supposed you could say, half-full. He poured a bolt of it into a glass that fit in Phil Needle’s hands not at all, poking and biting like a living skull.

“Sit with us,” said one of the men, his face in an eerie shadow. Phil Needle started to slide into the booth, but Steed blocked him on the chest with the decanter.

“No,” he said. “We’ve got to hole up for a little bit, gentlemen. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“At least tell us the title,” said one of the guys. “The name of this famed entertainment. Wet our whistles.”

Steed moved his eyes to Phil Needle, but then someone’s phone rang, a jumpy song that made everybody laugh. Tortuga. The drinks arrived. Thank you, powerful angels, et cetera. “See you in the morning, gentlemen,” Leonard Steed said, and tugged Phil Needle across the shadowy room.

“Watch him closely, Needle,” one of them said. “Don’t let him give you that nonsense from Socrates.”

“Steed tells that to everyone!” cried another one, but they were already far enough to fade away. This part of the room felt hotter, or perhaps that was the sip of fiery drink that felt to Phil Needle like it must be lighting him from the inside. Then he was sitting down, beneath the fluttering electric flame casting streaks of light across Leonard Steed’s face.

“How are you, Needle?”

“I think I’m all right,” Phil Needle said and then took a large gulp, so as to be able to say, “I should say I don’t have a title.”

Leonard Steed blinked for a second that made Phil Needle’s stomach sink. Then he smiled. “I’ve been reading,” he said, with a pause for the listener to appreciate that. “It’s this book about futile times. What do you know about them?”

“I don’t know.”

“The prevailing wisdom is that the peasants were working all the time,” he said with a sigh.
Feudal
, he must have said. “But there were always holidays, Needle. Lots of time to drink mead, roll around in the hay, what have you.” He opened his hands like something was simple.

“Oh.”

“I’m trying to follow their example,” he said. “Abandon the striving for wealth and embrace the striving for joy.”

“Peasants?” Phil Needle was nervous. He had no wealth, so he did not want to abandon it.

“Peasants,” Leonard Steed laughed, his eyes bright and focused just above Phil Needle’s head. The room was not spinning, but nevertheless Phil Needle felt spun. He could not help but think of the receipt for the rental car, the piece of Florio paper he had signed indicating that he knew what the rate for the room was. “Tomorrow we’re going to change radio. Do you feel eager?”

“Yes.”

“Of course!” Leonard Steed said. “Eager, but not desperate. The thing is not to be desperate. I mean, sound desperate. They like you already, Needle. I told you it’s a downhill battle, and you just slid further down the hill. Ass whoopings and lollipops—where’d you get that?”

“You told it to me,” Phil Needle said. “Two years ago.”

Leonard Steed opened his mouth wide to laugh at the ceiling. Two glints of light from the fixtures, curvy and sharp like tusks, framed his head. Shadows at the big table swiveled to listen to him. “No wonder I liked it. Now let’s stop talking about it. How’s tricks?”

“What?”

“How are you?”

Phil Needle finished his drink and commenced an abbreviated history of his day: Winter Air, Pennies Rental Car, Florio Hotel, Alma Levine.

Steed refilled him. “So your assistant is upstairs sharing a room with you now?”

“A suite.”

“To the victor go the spoils, eh?”

“What?”

“It sounds like this will be an exciting time for you. I expect to see you refreshed and delighted in the morning.”

“Steed—”

“
Needle—
”

“I’m a married man.”

“Nobody is denying that. Send an orchid to your wife.”

“And she’s young.”

“Too young?”

Phil Needle felt the flutter he had felt in the car all day. Leonard Steed reached under the table and patted his knee. For a sickly, jazzy moment, Phil Needle thought he might touch him between the legs, but the moment disappeared, and so did the hand.

“I don’t know,” Phil Needle said, putting more liquor in his mouth.

“Levine told me she mostly went to girls’ schools,” Leonard Steed said.

“When did she tell you this?”

“I talk to all of your staff, Needle,” Leonard Steed said. “You know that.”

“Yes, when they answer the phone, but—”

“Of course. I was touched on the phone with her,” he said, and drank from the decanter with his eyes closed. “Mmm. By something she said, Needle. She felt that a part of her was unfulfilled because of that school. Access to boys. She has a real candor, Needle. I like it. It has a sexual energy.”

It had taken Phil Needle this long to realize Leonard Steed was drunk. “I think I’m going to go to bed,” he said. “Long day.”

“And a long night waiting,” Leonard Steed said. “Or do you think she’s too young?”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Phil Needle said. “I want to be ready.”

“Yes, yes,” Leonard Steed said. “Venture out to get what you want, tonight and tomorrow. Learned that studying the classics at Harvard.
He who wants the world must first escape from it
.”

He did not say this quotation was from Socrates, and indeed it isn’t. It’s something Leonard Steed invented, and then reinvented as a remark of Socrates’s, for mutual authenticity. Phil Needle stood up to escape, deserting his drink and walking through the restaurant like he did not know where he was, which he didn’t quite. He slipped his key out of his pocket and tried to remember the number of his room, turning it over to see if the number was printed on the card—it never is—and then the world went blurry, visible only if he winked. For an instant he saw the tiny circle in space like a drop of water, and then it slipped to the floor: his contact lens. It had fallen away from him. He knelt down and felt along the floor for it, carefully and quickly. He could not feel it. He spread out further, although it couldn’t have gone far. Still, it was gone.
Did you need me for something?
his assistant had asked. On the bed. He moved his hands farther out, grabbing for it, then farther on all fours. Farther still. He would find it, goddammit, this thing he wanted. It was his. If he could not walk, he would crawl.

Where is she going?
Gwen imagined them thinking it. Her cooperation was requested in reserving these seats for elderly and handicapped passengers, but she was not cooperating. The seats were in front, nearest the driver, not a great place to sit if you were out committing a crime. Still, Gwen felt safer there, from the rattling wheels of the 38 and the total strangers in the other seats. She kept her eyes up. She was sure everyone wanted to know where she was going. It was none of their goddamn business. She put the bag down between her legs but kept gripping the paper handles. TODAY, it said on her hand.

It was the big night. She was taking the bus by herself.

The 38 was the bus’s name and number, swaying down San Francisco’s longest street, a straight, wide river passing banks alternately bustling and seedy. Out the window the city kept changing its mind in the night, with big department stores and then, suddenly, boarded storefronts, a strange, helmeted cathedral with a shiny plaza spread in front and then nothing but shifty apartment buildings and a bruised mall with a crumbly pagoda. And then it was Gwen’s stop, just as they had practiced.
Keep moving, wench
, she thought to herself, and lugged herself and her bag out the front door and down the stairs. Inside the bag was a can of gasoline, purchased at a faraway station with a story Gwen and Amber had invented and practiced about a breakdown and a pregnant mother, and a box of matches—the two items it seemed risky for the taxi driver to see, stacked up with the other provisions. And, squished in on top, a blanket, to cover the gasoline can and to throw over Nathan Glasserman, if necessary. If the bus driver heard the faint
slosh
inside the bag, he did not indicate it as the doors hissed closed, and if he had indicated it Gwen decided she wouldn’t care. The night air was so cool and smooth she wanted to marry it. It was the most pernicious secret weapon: Gwen was hooded in a sweatshirt she’d taken from her father. It hung a little loose, but she. Did. Not. Care. Anymore.

Hey,

I got tix to Tortuga tonite at the Fillmore!! I want you to be my date. My parents took my phone :
(
so don’t text just meet me here where it says on the map, so we can spend some time alone before the show . . .

Naomi

The letter had been drafted and redrafted at an emergency meeting. Her father giving her the tickets had changed everything. She’d texted Amber right quick and then held her father’s money in her damp fist in the taxi’s backseat, hoping it was enough to cover what was already on the meter from her dad’s stupid assistant and this journey too, from the condo to Octavia Boulevard. It wasn’t. She’d had to jump out at the corner of Market, throwing the bills into the front seat and sprinting out of view, her breath in her ears, rounding a corner and pressing flat against graffiti on a dirty brick wall.
U.S. Out Of This Alley.
They’d rethought the whole strategy, holed up in Amber’s room, where the other equipment was hidden.

The tickets seemed a better inducement. The original had only promised sex. Nathan was to meet Gwen at the bench, the wild place, and she would use her wiles on him until he was convinced or otherwise beaten into joining the others in the taxi. But Nathan played bass in a band: they couldn’t be sure what he’d been offered before. “This is better,” Amber had said to her, ripping the tickets to shreds and flushing them to sea so not one speck would be found.

Gwen had closed her eyes. “It’s tricky, though.”

“Verily,” Amber had said. “Tricky. Tricky and better.”

It
was
tricky, what they were doing. In pirate history, kidnappings are mostly a matter of ransom: what we can get for who we have. And there are rescues, young lads snatched from the streets who didn’t even know they wanted the pirate life until they were unchained and allowed on deck. But the plot for Nathan Glasserman was somewhere between these two opposite poles of being taken and being rescued. Gwen wanted him to be joined to her, but also to whisk him away. It was shanghaiing, what they were doing, with the drugged ale and the bright coin at the bottom of the glass. In
The Raid upon the Waves
the captain shanghaied an entire crew this way, hosting a party on his boat and putting up anchor when the last man had passed out. When they awoke they were a day toward Shanghai, but there was the coin as payment: both proof that they had agreed to such an arrangement, in the blur of ale and song, and the glittering first installment of the treasures promised them. Amber thought the map was the ale, and Gwen the coin, so that he might agree, in the blur of meeting someone in the dark, to come aboard. Amber redrafted the letter—one that would mislead the authorities when they ransacked his room, as Gwen was sure they would—and drew a new map. The arrow pointed to a dark park, just blocks away from the show. Nathan would approach from the southeast most likely and take the map with him. But the law, finding only the note, would scour the Fillmore audience and find nothing.

Gwen was early. She paced for a minute, afraid to be witnessed, then entered the glowing cube of the only open business on the block, a coffee shop that had nearly surrendered. A short guy with bloodshot eyes mutely handed her an empty cup and her change. You had to get it yourself, pump it out of a black plastic urn. She’d had little besides coffee all day. Gwen lugged her dangerous bag to the only table and huddled over it, still hooded. She would always remember this, she thought—her last coffee on land. Even if it all went wrong, she would remember the cheap steam that rose to the stained ceiling while she blinked and stared and gathered her nerve. (And Nathan Glasserman, the one responsible and maybe even to blame for all this? No Davy Jones’s locker for him. He would be scared with a good scare, but there would be nothing that would stop him from being a successful entertainment lawyer in fifteen years flat. Cody Glasserman, the younger brother, would be a different story.)

The bloodshot guy shuffled through a door marked
private
, leaving Gwen alone. Next to her table was a stack of cardboard trays holding bottles of water, all covered in tight clear plastic, a dusty accumulation of rations. They would have to steal water. Amber was only bringing one case.