The Confusion

Not that propriety had ever shaped Jack’s actions in the past. But only now was it coming clear to him that he had forgone his one opportunity to escape, and thereby gambled his life upon the success of the Plan: a Plan that, only an hour ago, he was silently mocking as inconceivably complex, and dependent upon too many persons’ exhibiting sundry rare virtues, such as cleverness and bravery, at just the right times. It was, in other words, a Plan that only desperate men would have come up with, a Plan in which it made no sense to participate unless one had no alternatives whatsoever. Jack had only gone along with it, to this point, because he’d always known he could jump ship before the worst parts of it were put into action.

Yet these others were not like John Cole.* Moseh and van Hoek and the others were more in the mold of John Churchill.†

Accordingly, Jack did not gamble, but contented himself with a tankard of cerveza-the first liquor that had passed his lips in something like five years-and simply gazing at the whores and barmaids, who were the first human females he had seen (other than the bat-like phantasms of Algiers) since Eliza. And his view of her had been obstructed by an incoming harpoon.

Suddenly van Hoek was on his feet, but he was smiling. A few moments later the four were outside on a tavern-street running along the foundations of the wall that faced the water-this looked as if sailors had been trying to undermine it, for hundreds of years, by burrowing tunnels through the stone with their urine.

“It is arranged,” van Hoek said. “He believes that my cargo will arrive tomorrow, or possibly the next day, on a jacht, and that she will be in a desperate hurry to cross the bar and unload. He says that ships from the north do this all the time, and that he can bribe the soldiers to fire signals during the night-time.”

They walked beneath Our Lady of Buenos Aires, which was disappointing: a fleck of stone in a bushel-sized niche. They departed the city the way they had entered into it, through a series of sneakings and petty briberies. An hour later they were in Bonanza, marking a path from the Vagabond-camp to the landward gates of the Viceroy’s villa by slashing blazes on tree-trunks. The sky above Spain was just beginning to dissolve the faintest stars when they returned to the galleot. The Corsairs, and the other members of the Cabal, were giddy that they’d actually come back; then excited, knowing that the Plan would actually go forward; then moody and apprehensive. They all tried to get some sleep, and most of them failed.

IN MID-MORNING, van Hoek began sending up spouts of pipe-smoke that swirled up through beams of hot sun and began migrating upriver-evidence of a breeze too faint for Jack to feel on his skin. This pleased everyone (because it suggested the brig could sail up from Cadiz today) except for van Hoek (who took it as a sign that the weather might be changing). The Dutchman spent the day pacing up and down the galleot’s central catwalk, just like a slave-driver, save that instead of cracking a whip he was fussing endlessly with his pipe and gazing balefully at the sky. It was senseless, Jack thought, to exert so much grim attention on weather that was not really changing. Then-brushing past van Hoek in the aisle-he came close enough to make out some of his words, and understood that the Dutchman was not cursing the elements, but rather praying. And he was not praying for the success of the Plan, but for his own immortal soul. Van Hoek had rowed as a slave for years because he refused to turn Turk. The Cabal had managed to convince him, through long debates on the roof of the banyolar, that the Plan did not really amount to piracy, because the Viceroy’s silver pigs were contraband to begin with, and the Viceroy himself a sort of landlubber Corsair. Finally van Hoek had accepted their arguments, or claimed to. But today he seemed to be in fear of hellfire.

Meanwhile, preparations were under way beneath the quarterdeck, and on those parts of the oar-deck that could be concealed under sails. The common slaves were encouraged to eat, drink, and rest. Members of the Cabal mostly unpacked certain strange goods, and organized them. In the rigging above, Corsairs adorned the masts and yards with a whorish gaudy array of banners and streamers.