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pirate,” Dara said. “Did Xavier tell you what we’re doing?”
    â€œMaking a movie, yes, about pirates. If I can help you I will. My home is in Eyl, in Somalia, but I’m here at least a week each month. I have a residence in the French Quarter and a car to get me around, a Mercedes-Benz drophead. It’s black, completely black, with dark windows to keep out the sun.”
    Sounding proud of it.
    â€œYou drive to Eyl?”
    â€œOnce in a while. Or I travel with a friend who has a Bentley and a driver.”
    â€œThat wouldn’t be Ari the Sheikh Bakar, would it? Known to his chums in England as Harry?”
    â€œAh, you are the one he met on the plane from Paris. Of course, Dara Barr, the filmmaker. I saw him briefly this afternoon. Yes, he said he met you, but you haven’t called him.”
    â€œI did, but there was no answer.”
    â€œHarry keeps busy. He runs around being the good guy.”
    â€œHe said his job is to talk to pirates.”
    â€œYes, he does that, tries to convince us there is no future in piracy. I tell him, who needs the future? We can make enough now to improve our lives. There is nothing dishonorable in what we do. The sea is our life.”
    â€œAsk him,” Billy Wynn said, “how much he thinks he’ll get for that Saudi tanker?”
    Idris said, “It’s taking months, isn’t it?” a pleasant sound to his voice. “That one isn’t mine, so I don’t know if progress is being made in negotiating a payment.”
    â€œThey started out wanting twenty-five million,” Billy said, “the ship and its load of crude worth ten times that.”
    â€œWell,” Idris said, “they could settle for only two or three million, it would still be profitable.”
    â€œYou know,” Dara said, “there are warships hunting you. The American navy, the French, German, Greek, even the Chinese.”
    â€œYes, I think I saw one or two warships,” Idris said. “I believe they’re painted gray?”
    Having fun with her.
    â€œYou and Harry,” Dara said, “are sworn enemies, but it sounds like you’re friends.”
    â€œDear, we met in this club two years ago, and had a good laugh we find out I’m the bad guy and he’s the good guy. I tried to get him to quit acting respectable and become a pirate.You know what he said, ‘I don’t need to make money that way. Mother sends me an allowance. Whatever I need.’”
    â€œHe sounds like a cool guy,” Billy said. “I should talk to him.”
    Then Idris asked Dara if she’d like to go for a drive. Dara hesitated a few seconds before she asked him to swear in the name of Allah he was a pirate and not putting her on. He swore he was a man of honor from Miami University in Ohio.
    Xavier said, “Girl, we leavin town oh-six-hundred. That’s A.M .”
    Too late. Dara was walking out with Idris.
    Xavier settled back, thinking, Now you worried about her goin out with an African pirate, after puttin up with Bosnian thugs and white supremacy assholes makin her pictures? She’s gonna shoot him in his Mercedes and fit it in someplace.

CHAPTER FOUR
    T HE FIRST DOCUMENTARY FILM Dara Barr shot on her own was called Women of Bosnia and it won an award at Cannes. Dara stayed on the women, no men in the picture identified, only the women after the men had used them.
    She made Whites Only intercutting neo-Nazi white supremacists with Klansmen wearing robes of different shades. It won Best Documentary at Sundance: skinheads and coneheads exposing their racism to Dara’s camera.
    She walked out of her studio on Chartres in the Quarter and shot Katrina ripping through New Orleans, flooding much of the city, and her two sisters, divorced, left town together for Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her mother and dad, retired, living on St. Charles Avenue, thought of having their home repaired for the third time, sold the