Djibouti

  Xavier said, walking off with Dara, “You right that time.”

  DARA MADE UP HER mind they were going to East Africa to get the real stuff, pirates in action boarding merchant ships. “And talk to them,” Dara said, “get their side, the entire shipping world against them. We’ll head south along the Somali coast to—wherever they’re holding the ships.”

  “Eyl,” Xavier said, “on the Indian Ocean. Gonna need a trawler, a deep-sea fishin boat cleaned up, can take any kind of sea. I get it ready, stock provisions—for how long?”

  “A month at least. Where do we get the boat?”

  “Djibouti, at the crossroads of us and the Arabs. Leave Djibouti, you in the Gulf of Aden lookin for pirates. Us and warships from around the world, all out there like we know what we doin.”

  “You’ve read about the pirates?”

  “You say we goin to Somaliland I read everything’s been written about pirates. The past few months the Internet’s heavy with pirate shit and the different navies after ’em.”

  “I’ll print out the latest stuff and read it on the plane,” Dara said. “I imagine we go to Paris first.”

  “Connect there to Djibouti. Air France or Daallo, you want to travel with the natives. You have a name for the movie?”

  “Modern-Day Pirates.”

  “About stock and bond salesmen?”

  “You like Djibouti?”

  “That has a sound to it, yeah. I’ll give you one, The Evil Solution.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “One of the pirates called it that. Man name of Shamun, head of the gang that took the Saudi tanker—seven times bigger than the Titanic. He said when evil is the only solution…No, he said they have to get Somalia to settle down first, with a gover’ment can go after the pirates when they ashore. He said get rid of the foreign boats fishin these waters and you rid of the foreign navies watchin over them. He said if they busy with fishin boats they can’t protect the ships haulin goods. Shamun said, ‘So they become our fish.’”

  “It’s not a bad line,” Dara said.

  “You want to hear what else he said? ‘What we doin might be evil, hijackin their ships. But if evil’s the only solution’—where I stole the title—‘then we do evil.’ This is a man in the middle of all this shit goin down, calls it The Evil Solution.”

  “It only works,” Dara said, “if the audience knows whose point of view it is. Otherwise it sounds like a Sherlock Holmes title.”

  “All right, you come up with the name of your picture,” Xavier said. “I won’t worry my head about it.”

  “Are you packed?”

  “Leavin tomorrow.” He said, “How about Dara Barr’s African Adventure? Have natives bangin on tribal drums.”

  “I was thinking of laying in drums,” Dara said.

  “Good, you gettin yourself in the mood,” Xavier said. “I’ll see you next week in Djibouti.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DARA WAS OUT ON the Buster twenty-seven days.

  She caught a ride on a supply plane off the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower and was back in Djibouti three days before Xavier arrived on the Buster. It gave her time to put together a rough cut with the beginning of an idea, a theme.

  SHE WAS IN HER suite at the Kempinski Palace again looking at happy-pirate footage on her seventeen-inch MacBook Pro. She had Idris Mohammed in his Mercedes trailing dust in the moonlight. She had Idris at the tiller of a Yahama-powered skiff trailing a high wake; Idris in sunglasses, a yellow scarf around his head; Idris and his Coast Guard boys going out to hijack a ship.

  She liked the rhythm of the edit: pirate skiffs getting a beat going with quick cuts to faces she thought of as rimshots coming in a flow of action and gone. She cut much of the shipping footage: cargo ships and tankers in extreme long shots, too far away to tell if they were moving. She kept most of the navy ships and helicopters, the few she had: a dozen countries out patrolling the Gulf of Aden, but try to find them. She did have the light plane attempting to drop bags of ransom on the deck of an oil tanker, and missing. Several pirates drowned trying to retrieve the loot. One washed ashore with $153,000 tied in his shirt. There were clips that had too much lead she’d trim to get in and get out. An excess of scenery to cut: long shots of villages on the Somali coast. She’d keep Eyl, Eyl was the stuff, drama developing that she hadn’t expected.

  Dara thought of a place for the cooch dancers shaking their pongee bums at blinding speed. If she were to take them out of the Djibouti sequence, show pirate faces in a moving skiff, eyes half-closed in the wind, a wad of khat in their jaws, and cut to the cooch dancers?

  She thought, Aren’t you clever? Lose the poetic fucking around and keep the girls where they belong, in Djibouti.

  Xavier had brought several bouquets of khat aboard in dry ice. He told her it was ghat in Yemen, jaad sometimes in Somalia, Kenya shipping twenty tons of khat to Somalia every day. In a population of seven or eight million—women and children not chewing or getting much of a chance—that left a million males with wads in their cheeks. How much was that, two pounds a day each? Ask Xavier.

  She had questioned his bringing a pistol aboard. She said, “None of the freighters are armed. It’s international law.”

  “But if they had guns,” Xavier said, “they wouldn’t get hijacked, would they? Nobody’s gonna take the Buster from us.”

  She worked at a dining table the hotel brought in and watched the entire twelve hours of footage on her laptop while she waited for Xavier. She would edit it down to their first two weeks at sea: to Idris’s party at his home in Eyl; the fun-loving pirates turning against them, not so loving anymore; and finally, meeting Jama, the African American al Qaeda Muslim who becomes a one-man gang. Most of Jama would come later.

  By the time she finished editing, still not sure now what the documentary was about, she had a feeling she could make it work. It was alive, it was about what was going on right now in the Middle East. She would look at footage with Xavier and hear his ideas, what he thought could be the theme. He’d say it looked like two different stories. What did she have to hold the whole thing together? What was it about?

  She had spent four weeks with Xavier in a thirty-foot boat. Apart only three days and she couldn’t wait to see him again; he’d become part of her life. If he were thirty-seven years younger she might even be in love with him. Maybe. She thought about a young version of Xavier.

  When the hotel phone rang she picked up and said, “Xavier?”

  “Miss Dara? Yeah, this is Xavier. How you doin?”

  “Not bad,” Dara said. “Yeah, I remember you now, the tall colored man? Why don’t you stop by for a drink?”

  “I could do that,” Xavier said, “it don’t put you out none.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Still at the dock. A man’s been waitin here to search Buster. Now he wants me to go to the U.S. Embassy with him. I could be a while.”

  “Tell them whatever he wants to know,” Dara said. “I did. I worked three whole days, got through all twelve hours and now I’m taking the rest of the day off, drinking champagne in my underwear.”

  “Do I get to see that?”

  She said, “It’s too bad you’re an old man.”

  “You either cheeky or horny,” Xavier said, “talkin to me like that. I get to the hotel, you want to make a bet on what happens?”

  XAVIER ARRIVED WITH EVERYTHING they had on the boat. They talked, having fun getting back together. Once they got around to sitting next to each other, the laptop on the dining table, Dara in her bra and shorts, they watched Buster leaving Djibouti on the way to the gulf. Dara had shot this from the concrete pier.

  “For now, this is how we open.”

  “You got the boys swimmin for the loot drowned?”

  “It comes later.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad way to open. Droppin the money bags and missin the deck. You got your audience glued to the screen.”

  “We could open on the cooch dancers,
” Dara said, “you want to get creative. We see it as we shot it, leaving Djibouti, and decide how to move scenes around.”

  Now they were watching Dara aboard, shooting straight ahead from the deck, Buster’s bow in the foreground rising as the sea rolled beneath her to come down in the trough.

  “The first couple of days,” Dara said, “I expected the next wave would swamp us.”

  “You didn’t get sick.”

  “You saw how I looked.”

  “Till you learned Buster’s ways. Lookit how you held the camera steady.” Xavier said, “Where’s Billy Wynn? You kept him in the picture, didn’t you?”

  “He’s coming up abaft. Here, Pegaso blowing past us, a hundred yards off our port bow.”

  “Man, you the little sailor, ain’t you?”

  They watched the sailboat on the screen coursing past them.

  “You don’t have him comin about, goin back to Djibouti?”

  “We don’t see Helene,” Dara said. “We thought he’d left her.”

  “Then changed his mind,” Xavier said, “and was goin back to get her.”

  “I could speculate in voice-over why he turned around,” Dara said, “but Billy’s not what this is about. Or Helene.”

  “You mean what you thought at the time,” Xavier said. “We don’t see them again till comin on two weeks.”

  “Ten days,” Dara said. “Billy with his elephant gun.”

  “Man, he put on a show, didn’t he?”

  “That’s when Idris joined us on the Buster.”

  “I like all that,” Xavier said. “Things happenin.”

  “We leave Billy flying past—”

  “We don’t see him come about?”

  “Forget Billy, he’s somewhere ahead of us now. I’ll say Pegaso is vulnerable in a hostile sea and we hope to run into Billy again sometime soon.”

  “I see Billy comin on as star of the movie.”

  “What about Jama?”

  “He’s good, but he’s the bad guy.”

  “Jama shot five people at one time, but I don’t have it on film. None of the things he did.”

  “Girl, he’s still the bad guy.”

  “I don’t know how I’m going to work that.”

  “We see the bodies comin out of the house,” Xavier said. “Then cut to us in our deck chairs sippin wine and chewin on khat. I noticed you favor it.”

  “I’d like it a lot better,” Dara said, “if there was another way to do it. Chewing leaves to get a buzz—”

  “Fucked with your sensibilities, didn’t it? You been thinkin, what if you crumbled up the leaves and smoked it. Would that work?”

  “Would it?” Dara said.

  THE FOOTAGE ON THE screen showed pinpoints of light dotting the Somali coast. Dusk now, a lamp hung from the foremast to throw a dreary light on the open deck, the Buster plowing ahead.

  “What you gonna talk about here?”

  “Hoping we run into pirates. I’ll list the countries with warships out here hoping the same thing, and cut to…Here it is, the guided missile cruiser, CG-66, coming up on us with that blinding spotlight.”

  “Like it’s gonna eat us up,” Xavier said, “or want to board us. Man, it’s big. All that gray metal risin over us. You tell who you are and ask ’em over for a drink.”

  “First I got on the bullhorn,” Dara said, “and told them to identify themselves.”

  “They got a kick out of that, the Buster givin ’em orders. You tell who you are and the captain knows you from your films. He called them ‘docs.’ A word you never use.”

  “I don’t care for ‘docs.’ I think we were delaying the ship from being somewhere. I like the clip, though, tracking over the sailors looking down at us.”

  “Close on six hundred feet of cruiser slidin alongside. They want to know what we doin,” Xavier said. “You tell ’em through the bullhorn, ‘We makin a movie about pirates.’ What you think we doin. I thought the PA voice would say somethin about the task force out here in harm’s way to protect shipping and run off the pirates. They love to use ‘harm’s way.’ You see the steward mates? They wonderin what’s this tall-ass nigga doin with that hot white chick? Out in the middle of the ocean. I bet they still talkin about it. ‘Man, he’s got the deal.’”

  XAVIER WOULD PLAY WITH the Sony, the big camcorder, the days nothing they wanted appeared on the sea, the Buster still bearing east, Xavier shooting life aboard the Buster. Dara frying fish would look up to see Xavier with the Sony on her. He’d say for home movies he’d watch on his TV. Dara on deck in a canvas chair against the wheelhouse, the boat drifting, it didn’t matter, Dara looking fine in her shorts and T-shirt that said Laissez les bons temps rouler across the front. Blond hair curling out of her do-rag, a cowboy bandana. She’d look up at him through her shades and shake her head.

  He said, “You documentin pirates—we ever see any—and I’m documentin Dara Barr makin herself famous. They gonna say, ‘Why, this Dara Barr’s just a girl,’ I show anybody my footage. I shoot you starin at me and lookin away. Certain times.” Xavier sitting with his back against the foremast, long brown legs stretching out of his trunks, no supporter, sometimes seeing the shape of his donkey lying beneath shiny green satin. Xavier LeBo believed was he ten years younger, they’d be letting good times roll all over this boat. See if they could manage in the hammock.

  They watched themselves on the Buster now.

  “Four-hour watches,” Xavier said, “means the one on deck can look at the hammock but not get in it. You can’t see all the way around the way the hammock curls up on you.” Xavier slept on deck during her watch to see if she stayed awake. Dara would say to him—Xavier sneaking over to see if her eyes were open—“Jesus, will you go to sleep.”

  So Xavier tried sleeping below when he was off and would lie awake waiting to hear Dara scream at a shape coming out of the dark. When she did yell into the hatch, “Boats coming up on us…”

  Xavier, in the bow, jumped up ducking his head.

  “They in sight?”

  “Not yet. I hear them, three boats.”

  WHEN XAVIER WOULD WATCH Women of Bosnia with Dara and look over to see her staring at her work on the screen, she’d be chewing gum in time to the women speaking. On the beat. No hurry. Waiting and picking it up again. She said one time, after, still in her seat, “Fuck.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I stayed too long on their hands. Like I’ve never seen hands before.”

  Xavier, working on Katrina, would try all kinds of weird angles, shooting down on a scene, or zoom in for a smash close-up, his favorite. Dara would say to him, “We’re telling a story: the way hurricanes leave people and what they do. That’s drama enough.”

  Xavier would hear her quiet voice in his head. This nice woman he kept thinking was a fox. Dara keeping some other part of her under wraps.

  This time she told him she heard three boats coming.

  THEY WATCHED TWO OF the pirate boats swerve in close to cut their speed and have a look at them on the Buster before veering off after the first boat, going for a cargo ship in the distance, Dara waving and yelling to them, “Stop by on your way back,” as loud as she could.

  Xavier remembered shooting Dara but didn’t see her in the footage on the screen.

  “They comin like wild dogs and you cut it?”

  “I like ‘coming like dogs,’” Dara said, “but we don’t need that girl showing off, that ‘Stop on your way back.’ Did you see Idris?”

  “Those Arabs tend to look alike to me.”

  “He was in the lead boat, the guy in the yellow kaffiyeh. We’re meeting him tomorrow,” Dara said. “Today he’s occupied.”

  “Takin care of business,” Xavier said. “You guessed there were three boats comin.” He waited and said, “Didn’t you?”

  “At first I thought there were four,” Dara said. “It turns out Idris had two Yamahas on his.”

  Was this nice girl having fun with him? Xavier could never be su
re.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THEY WERE CLOSER NOW to the cargo ships and tankers on the screen, Dara using a Super Telephoto lens, the big Sony mounted on sticks to keep the camera steady while she brought the ships even closer: as many as five or six spread over the screen at one time, merchant ships and now and then a warship riding shotgun.

  “Most of this was filmed during our third week,” Dara said. “I slipped it in here to get something going.”

  “You know how many times I shot you punchin up news stories on your Mac? Where’s that footage?”

  “I’m using the information.”

  “But you don’t show how you gettin it way out here, waitin for somethin to happen.”

  “I’m showing what the news story’s about. Here, the U.S. missile cruiser…”

  “What I don’t see,” Xavier said, “is any documentary stuff goin on. Where the people this is about, the poor Somalis havin to hijack ships. The only one I’ve seen was drivin a tricked-out Mercedes.”

  “It’s coming up,” Dara said. “The logline is they’ve gone after a hundred and eleven ships, hijacked forty-two and collected fines that come to over thirty million, for trespassing.”

  “You can say that with a straight face, huh?”

  Dara said, “Shut up, please, and watch.” She said, “Eight ships are still in the hands of the hijackers. They’re negotiating. What we want to find out is who all’s involved.”

  Now they were looking at the guided missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf on the screen. “Flagship,” Dara said, “of Combined Task Force 151. A search and seizure crew from the cruiser—the guys in the inflatable boat—are rounding up the pirates in their skiff. I’ll say something about the seven guys with their hands in the air.”

  “No match for the U.S. Navy.”

  “I’ll say they’re being taken to the cruiser, where they’ll be identified by the crew from Polaris, a ship registered in the Marshall Islands. I’ll say the Somali rights activists have been thwarted in their attempt to seize the Polaris and levy a fine. Cut to the cruiser’s Seahawk helicopter firing at them. Or I might call it the cruiser’s gunship.”