Nautical Intervention

by Josh Goldfaden

The Pertunda
Pertunda: Italian goddess of sexual love and pleasure, presides over the marriage bed, that is, the deflowering of virgins.

In this instance, a 37-foot schooner, heading south under power at 12 knots in the Ionian Sea, northwest of Corfu.

The Main Deck
Cap gives the signal to cut the boat’s engine, so Little John cuts the engine.

Bertok, who gets an itch in the middle of his back whenever he’s nervous and who’s entirely too muscle-bound to get near the itch, tries to scratch it with the tip of his machete.

Cap gives me the help-Bertok-out, he’s-liable-to-butcher-himself-with-that-machete look, so I scratch the itch. Bertok moans lightly, remembers that the command for silence was given ten minutes ago, and tries to blend the moan into something aquatic, a porpoise call is my guess. Cap gives him an approving nod.

Little John steers us toward the yacht, and Daeng pulls his balaclava tight and passionately strokes the shaft of his AK-47. His glass eye shimmers in the Mediterranean night sky—he enjoys all this way too much.

The yacht we are approaching, The Good Life, is dark; they’re asleep, whoever they are. It’s what people mean by clockwork, I suppose, the way we all know our parts. Bertok hooks the steel ladder to their starboard bow, and Daeng slings back his automatic and goes first, his little frame scampering like a woolly bug.

Once aboard, he does a series of Hollywood somersaults and back-flips, producing a pair of Colt .45s, which he points in all directions. My weapon of choice is a solid birch rolling pin, an agile yet not too deadly companion who’s gotten me out of some pretty hairy situations in addition to rolling out some delicate, buttery pie crusts. Daeng does his little whistle that means all clear, and Cap, myself, and Bertok climb aboard. Little John waits with the boat, because he’s too good-hearted and utterly not fearsome. Also, his the patrol-boat-is-coming hoot is a perfect imitation of a sperm whale song. It’s uncanny.

Below deck, we split into two groups, and I’m stuck with Daeng, who keeps asking time? and then answering it himself with ninety seconds! and then a hundred twenty seconds! At the bedroom door, he gives me an elaborate sequence of hand signals that could mean anything, but I think say, I’ll riddle them with bullets, and you thrash the corpses to further death with your rolling pin. I give him my junior high school coach’s sign for “steal second base,” for “slide,” and for “suicide squeeze.”

He shakes his head at my lack of professional brutality, kicks down the door, and does another of those somersaults into the room. I step over the discarded door, annoyed that it was probably unlocked anyway, but as Cap is always reminding us, it’s chiefly Daeng’s showmanship that makes him a successful pirate.

I flip a light switch and Daeng shouts, “Who wants to fucking die?”

The middle-aged couple in bed look a lot like I’d look if I had been woken up by a hairy Indonesian maniac in a black mask pointing an AK-47 at me and asking if I wanted to die.

“Nobody’s going to die,” I say, indicating my rolling pin.

“No way,” he says. “Last time, nobody died. It was bullshit!”

“Nobody dies.”

He raises a bushy eyebrow and gestures to the woman.

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

We march them onto the main deck, where Bertok is already duct-taping the hands and feet of two men and two women. Bertok is a virtuoso with duct tape and a machete, and it’s a shame these folks are too afraid to enjoy his handiwork. When all six are bound, Cap steps forward.

The Shpiel
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Captain Arthur Trilling.” He walks behind them and shakes their bound hands. “Arthur Trilling,” he says to each. He sighs mournfully to illustrate the weight of his coming speech.

“Piracy,” he begins, and gives the whole shpiel. It’s important to Cap that people understand the historical context behind us stealing all their stuff. His grandfather was an actor who achieved some measure of success as a swashbuckler in silent films; Cap’s father wore a patch over his eye—a childhood misadventure—and ran a Caribbean-themed eatery in West Covina.

As always, Cap brings up Blackbeard, his idol, and how Blackbeard’s biggest weapon was his ability to cause fear, how he’d stick slow-burning matches among his whiskers and behind his ears to appear ablaze with power.

“Fear,” Cap says, “is far stronger than all the muscles on this man here,” and he points to Bertok, who shrugs, clearly not in agreement.

“I’d wreck Blackbeard,” Bertok says. “Everybody know that.” The six try to smile encouragingly.

Cap is interested in timelessness. His greatest pleasure comes from imagining the time, well after his death, when people will speak of him with the sort of reverence associated with such other genius-villains as Blackbeard and Billy the Kid. He believes in the perfect act of piracy, a flawless performance in which the five of us and our “customers” (Cap’s word) would know exactly where to move and what to say. There’d be a progressive sense of movement, the entire experience adding up to more than the sum of its parts (in the same way the five of us together are greater than any of us could have been on our own).

He thinks he’s helping people: the terror they’re subjected to will ultimately help them reassess the value of their lives. In the perfect heist, they’d realize it while it was happening. He also wants them to see their own guilt in the matter: the oblivious sense of entitlement that allows them to anchor a two-million-dollar yacht less than two hundred yards away from a piss-poor fishing village.

While Cap is in instructional mode and Daeng is collecting the goodies in his burlap sack, I head to the galley. I’m pleased to discover that somebody aboard fancies himself a chef. But obviously, whoever he—or she—is, is a hack; I can tell by their knives—Sabatier, so ridiculously overpriced—also their cutting board is plastic, and they have store-bought curry powder. There are, however, some indications of decency: eight tins of Sevruga caviar, a huge cut of perfectly marbled beef, three bottles of decent cognac, a spice grinder, two cases of adequate Burgundy, some black truffle oil, and a nice-sized hunk of fresh ricotta salata.

I hump the supplies back on deck, where Daeng is waiting and Cap is finishing up. “You are fine people,” he says, “sexy, yet classy, and will most likely be rescued sometime tomorrow afternoon. Nevertheless, I’ll be leaving you with a dozen bottles of water, because dehydration is a sucker’s way of killing.”

To Cap, there are distinctly right and wrong ways to conduct a “nautical intervention.” It’s his unbending adherence to these pirating principles that he believes will lead to his future status as a legend.

I respect Cap’s idealism, but for me, pirating is just a way to finance my restaurant. Three years ago, when Cap found me, I was working at a little bistro in Crete for a prick of a head chef who took credit for my recipes. Never again. So far, I’ve saved about ninety thousand dollars, and jewelry worth about fifty thousand—I figure I’ll need two hundred and fifty thousand to finance the whole thing.

Cap continues, “I’ve shared something of myself, I think, in these minutes. You’ve seen the type of pirate I am. As a final request, I’d ask that each of you suggest a nickname for me: something that could capture the essence of who I am and help me counteract the short memory of Time in the way “Blackbeard” did for its host, Edward Drummond.”

“I don’t understand,” a man in tan silk pajamas says.

“Please, just leave us alone,” another says.

“Kind people,” Cap continues, “delight in your fear; give it a little squeeze, don’t fight it. Imagine this time as an extraordinary memory, because it soon will be. Enjoy us: I’m Cap—but I believe there must be a better name out there. This is Bertok. Have you ever seen anyone wilder than Bertok? Think about the fine story you’ll tell about this someday.”

“Don’t kill us,” one of the women says.

Cap keeps trying to explain how all he wants is a good nickname, but these people are too afraid to understand anything. They snivel, and Cap insists they have nothing to snivel about: Nobody’s going to lay a finger on them; this is the greatest night of their ho-hum lives. But all his insisting works them up even more, and soon one of them, a balding, droopy-eyed man, is in hysterics, so Cap gives Daeng a nod, and the guy is (mercifully) knocked out by the butt of Daeng’s AK-47.

And then his wife is in tears, and Daeng is cursing her for being unappreciative.

“I’m sorry everyone,” Cap says, and he is. He’s a peculiar guy, but also utterly sincere and very weepy. “I’ve tried my best tonight to steal everything you have except your dignity, but I can see I’ve failed you.”

Bertok places an arm around the dejected Cap and leads him back to the ladder.

“Nice one,” I say to the crying woman, but of course she’s just afraid—didn’t mean to upset Cap. Daeng, though, takes out his glass eye and sits directly in front of the crying woman, tells her to look into his skull for forgiveness...

And so we’re out of there. (read the rest in our current issue)

Josh Goldfaden lives in San Clemente and operates WebAha!, a website-design company (www.webaha.com), with his wife, the poet Jennifer Chapis E-mail: jgoldfaden@yahoo.com