Free The Pirate's Daughter by Robert Girardi Page B

or any other woman in the crowd.”
    She shook her head. “I got there really late, with some friends. Just in time to see you throw your money away on those two miserable Bupus. Then you jumped down from that car, and I lost you in the crowd. A few minutes later, someone said you had left in a limousine. So how much did you win?”
    Wilson hesitated. Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself. “Sixteen thousand,” he mumbled.
    Cricket grinned and squeezed his arm. Her grip was like iron. “Ha!” she said. “The man who doesn’t gamble.”
    â€œI’m not a gambler,” Wilson insisted. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”
    â€œIs gambling against your religion or something?”
    Wilson shrugged. “Gambling caused a lot of friction between my parents. My mom always wanted my dad to settle down, get a real job. He kept really strange hours and was never around when you needed him, that’s what I remember most. And we were either rich or poor; there was no in between, no stability. Don’t get me wrong, Dad was not a compulsive type. Gambling was a business to him. He always played the smart odds, and he never lost real money. But I remember arguments through closed doors, my mother crying. It wasn’t great.”
    They rode along a few stops in silence. Bupandan women, their heads wrapped in colorful scarves, got off and on, dragging three or four children behind.
    â€œI guess it can be tough if you’re like them,” Cricket said, “if you have kids. Do you have any kids?”
    â€œNone that I know of,” Wilson said.
    They got off the bus at the corner of Lowry and Cantor and walked over into the Bend to the army-navy surplus place on Allen Street. There, Wilson picked out a compass and jackknife, a dual-lens flashlight, a large canvas duffel bag, a rain poncho, deck shoes, several sweaters permeated with a waxy, waterproof substance, cans of insect repellent, and, at Cricket’s insistence, a pair of army-issue night-vision goggles.
    These odd binoculars reminded Wilson of an old-fashioned stereopticon, the Victorian visual toy that made images of famous places and people look three-dimensional, and he recalled the stereopticon and box of slides he had found at the bottom of a mildewed trunk in the attic of his great-aunt’s house in Warwick years ago. He had stayed at the old woman’s house on forlorn holidays away from the Catholic orphanage-school where she had sent him after his mother’s death. And now, as he fitted the night-vision goggles acrossthe bridge of his nose, he half expected to see some of those old sepia slides again: Queen Victoria, President Taft, Fatty Arbuckle, the Cathedral at Chartres, the Sphinx in Egypt, the lobby of the Empire Hotel in Parkerville, complete with spittoons, overstuffed sofas, and potted palms.
    But the night-vision goggles showed only a few vague shapes outlined in hazy static.
    â€œThese are no good,” Wilson said.
    Cricket took them off his face, made a few adjustments, peered through the eyepieces at the cash register overhung by the canopy of a World War II—era silk parachute. “They’re fine,” she said. “It just has to be dark for them to work properly.”
    â€œOne hundred seventy-five bucks!” Wilson fingered the price tag.
    â€œYou never know when someone will come at you in the dark,” Cricket said, and threw them into the basket.
    Outside again, along Allen Street, Wilson paused at a secondhand bookstall and picked out a few of the longest volumes he could find: An old Modern Library version of
Don Quixote
, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Caulaincourt’s
With Napoleon in Russia
, Steadman’s
History of World War One
, and a lurid fifties-era paperback edition of
Manon Lescaut
—described in hysterical jacket copy as a novel of “betrayal and obsessive love”—by the