Bay of Souls Page 6

  When he had parked the car, the first thing he saw was Paul's vaguely worried face at the kitchen window. It had started to snow. When he went inside to the lingering savor of the night's meal, he realized how fiercely hungry he was.

  "I put a few slices of lamb in the lower section of the oven," Kristin said when she walked in. "They'll be pretty dried out."

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I got involved in the Phyllis Strom committee." The academic career of Phyllis Strom had its thorny aspect as an alibi.

  "Really?" Kristin asked. "How's life on the Phyllis Strom committee?"

  "Never a dull moment," Michael told her.

  4

  IN THE snow-sealed silence of his carrel, Michael read the reflections of one Keith Michneicki on Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. Keith was a twenty-year-old from the apple orchards of the lake country. He was a hockey star, also a perceptive, thoughtful reader.

  Maybe alone in the class, Keith had recognized the vitalism on which Red Badge turned, the priesthood of the life force, the riddle of blood and sacrifice. Like any good, clean-living American boy, he had pretended not to know what he was looking at, and faked it sloppily.

  "Henry realizes," Keith had written, "that we have within us the wherewithal to cope with each of life's challenges."

  There was no excuse for it, even if down on the lake, in apple-knocker country, enough people still believed that this was the kind of lesson boys went off to college to learn.

  "Read the book!" he wrote on Michneicki's paper. "Is it propaganda? Truth or illusion?"

  Then he put the papers aside and turned to his computer. Encouraged by Norm Cevic, he had been spending a great deal of time trying to track his new friend Lara on the Internet.

  He found her ex-husband first, a Frenchman named Laurent Corvus, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Geneva, assistant in Africa to the late Desmond Jenkins, a left-wing European expert on colonialism. He had begun as a secondary school teacher and then worked for the Red Cross and for the UNRRA in the Middle East. His listing was posted by a site dedicated to foreign affairs and security matters. He had occupied a few vice chancellorships and assistant directorates at some African universities. It was hard to imagine what would bring him to Fort Salines.

  Lara herself, under her maiden name of Purcell, appeared on a few other sites. She was a graduate of Swiss schools and had an advanced degree from the Sorbonne. Her area of study was the Caribbean and the former colonial world in general. She had worked with her husband and also as an assistant to Desmond Jenkins.

  Marie-Claire Purcell grew up in St. Trinity, a poor island on the elbow of the Windwards; her listing contained a pocket history of the place. St. Trinity was a British sugar island that supported an exotic culture of exile. In 1804, at the end of the Haitian wars of independence, hundreds of French slave owners had arrived from Cap Haitien with their property and slaves. Vodoun and various forms of the French language persisted there.

  The site listed her publications: a short history of St. Trinity, a study of French colonial settlement in West Africa and the Caribbean. It went on to advertise a hotel, apparently owned by her family in All Saints Bay, in the south of the island. And it listed a number of books by her brother, John-Paul Purcell, an authority on Caribbean religious practices. He had written and published a great deal. Lara herself sat on the board of some corporations doing business in the tropical Americas. She seemed also to connect with an entity called AbouyeCarib.com.

  This site, however, was guarded by a square patch appearing in the middle of Michael's screen demanding a password. The patch was intricately designed and vaguely forbidding. He had come late and resistant to the world of the Internet, only a little less phobic about it than his wife. His one feat of electronic athleticism had consisted of decrypting the password on his son's computer, which was Falo, the dog's name backward, in defiance of dyslexia.

  His plan had been to meet Cevic for lunch so they could go over whatever he had printed from the Web. There was not very much. Crossing the welter of slush and freeze between his office and the door of the deli restaurant in town, he instead decided to keep the handful of documents to himself.

  Over barbecued beef, Norman complained about the college bureaucracy. He had spent the morning as the faculty representative on a committee that worked with the college employees' union. Michael listened impatiently.

  "What do you think," he finally asked Cevic when they had finished their sandwiches, "about the presence of the intelligence community on campus?"

  "Aha!" Norman said. It was the sort of question he relished on a topic he enjoyed. It would be hard to tell, though, how much he really knew about it.

  "Are they here?"

  "Oh yeah," Norman said. "They're here all right." But it would have been strange if Norman had said they weren't.

  "Like," Michael asked, "where?"

  "Well, you ask our new colleague about that. She works out of the late Ridenhour's shop, does she not? And Professor Doctor Ridenhour's department is surely the answer to your question. I mean," Norman said, "this is interesting. The other day I send you off to frolic with Lara. Now you're asking me about spookery. How about you tell me what prompts this question?"

  "I just thought she had a very cosmopolitan background for a rustic setting like our own."

  "Well, now I'm hurt," Norman Cevic said. And of course he was. Ahearn had never learned to pay enough attention. "I like to claim something of a cosmopolitan background. I've come a long way from Iron Falls. But here I am."

  "You're a regional specialist," Michael said, rousing himself to flattery. "You're here for your own research. It's different with ... Ridenhour's people."

  Cevic appeared to be mollified.

  "You know I worked abroad during the war," he said. "I worked all over the world at one time. The Michigan Project. Aid for International Development."

  "That's why I'm asking you this question, Norman."

  "Ridenhour had his great days," Norman said. "Tucked away here in the toolies but with friends at court."

  Norman played with the expensive pack of cigarettes he had bought at the smoke shop in town. There it was forbidden to light one. Since he had briefly considered resuming smoking, Michael was discovering it was no longer possible to smoke anywhere. Norman held forth.

  "By the late seventies the intelligence people had lost their hold on the eastern universities. Except for locations like Yale, where they were built into the bricks—but even there they had to be truly covert. So places like this flourished. You couldn't recruit in the big places—the other side made it a conscious strategy, manipulating bodies in campus demonstrations to run the Agency out. And so on. But out here the milk of patriotism never ran thin, right? The army. Military intelligence could use places like this. The uniform, the flag."

  Norman kicked back in his chair, warming to the topic, the years of his provincial share in imperium.

  "So, the snobs in Washington bitched that the agencies weren't getting the best people anymore. They hated to see intelligence work get to be a blue-collar occupation. They had seen the same thing happen to the officer corps. They used to say, Shit, it's getting to be like Hoover's FBI, the sons of Mormon farmers, the sons of Boston cops."

  "So," Michael said, "they ended up with people like us."

  "They discovered the uses of adversity. They could always operate here without much scrutiny. They could lay people off, people who were hot, keep them out here until they cooled off. For example, you'd have a guy come through, you'd discover he'd run a think tank in Hawaii, he was Bones at Yale. What's he doing here? Ask not, as they used to say. They'd send a guy here the way they used to send a promising officer to staff school, the War College. What he did wasn't necessarily what he was seen to do."

  "So Ridenhour's scene was like a safe house?"

  "Like a consulate. A chapter. A retreat. All those things."

  "So," Michael said, "here's Ridenhour
and his outfit. But the Cold War's over. Ridenhour's dead. What does life hold for these folks?"

  "The captains and the kings depart," said Norman. "The peace punks are day traders online, their masters and manipulators, the young Lenins of the movement, are running departments, shoehorning their kids into Senate internships. Man, I could tell you stories. I could cite incidents. I could bring evidence to bear, man." Norman shook his head, growling.

  "Nothing left?"

  "Secrets, Michael."

  "Secrets?"

  "Maybe you can recruit in Harvard Yard again. But the walls have eyes. Places like this you can place the casualties, the burnouts, the Men Who Know Too Much. You can contain these little worlds. Beyond that," he said, straightening up, "there's damn little going on worth hiding. The Middle East action is pretty up-front in security terms. Most people are on board. What's left is the war on drugs, and nobody likes that much. It's dangerous. It's essentially boring, like it's got no cultural content. It stinks. I wouldn't look for it around here."

  "I thought this was where they came when they couldn't go anywhere else."

  "It's a cemetery," Norman said. Then he looked at Michael for a moment. "Except maybe for your girlfriend. She's a live one."

  "You mean Lara."

  Norman did a lovely bland blink.

  "Did I say Lara?" He wrestled his graveled tones toward delicacy.

  "You said girlfriend."

  "A momentary lapse, dear boy. But I bet madame there, she's got a juicy résumé, n'est-ce pas? Checked it out?"

  "I ran into classified stuff."

  "Exactly," Norman said. "The thing would be to get around that."

  Michael did not answer him.

  Back at his computer, he ran Lara down to her lair behind the odd-looking logo that demanded his password. On prolonged examination, the insignia was a more ominous presentation than it had first appeared, hard to make out on the screen. It was a thing of colors. Was the redorange shaded figure a cockscomb? Was what appeared to be a face really one? Did it have a ferocious jaw with bloodied, mandrill-like fangs? What else lurked among the dark green stalks?

  The thing was unsettling. Each time he called it up, it seemed to leave an afterimage in the middle of his screen. One of those creepy things you found out there. Everyone knew the Web was teeming with them. And some aspect of this woman lurked behind this one.

  Toward dusk, Michneicki, hockey-playing apple picker, showed up to discuss his paper.

  "Read the text," Michael told him.

  Michneicki read aloud from The Red Badge of Courage: "'He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.' So he understands that death is part of life," Michneicki declared complacently. "He matures."

  "The novel is about war, Keith. It's not just a coming-of-age story. It's about the purifying effect of struggle. It's not about discovering personal identity. It's about transcending it."

  Michneicki frowned, shrugged and looked at Michael for help.

  "What do you get out of a game like hockey?" Michael asked him. "Does it make you feel like a small child again?"

  "Huh?"

  "Does it make you feel a small child? Like you're returning to infancy?"

  "No way," Michneicki said.

  "You're an enforcer out there. I've seen you. You like to hit people?"

  The young man laughed. "Not a whole lot." He flushed and looked at his big hands. "Not really."

  "Are you afraid of getting hit? Does it hurt a lot?"

  "No," Keith Michneicki said.

  "No. And how do you feel after a game?"

  "If we win," Keith said, "great."

  "Part of something bigger than yourself?"

  "Well," said the young apple knocker, "the game's not about one guy."

  "What's it about?"

  "Winning?"

  "No, I'm asking you. Is it about winning?"

  "Naw," he said. "Not really. Not for me."

  "How about making the beer taste better?"

  "All right," Keith said. "OK. Right."

  "Because you've been up against it. Because you've been part of something bigger than yourself. It's a kid's game but it's not really a kid's game, is it?"

  "At a certain point," Keith said, "it's not a kid's game anymore."

  "What is it? What is it like?"

  "Like everything else," Keith said.

  "It's like life, isn't it?"

  "It's life," Keith said. "But it's awesome. It's better."

  "More perfect," Michael suggested. "Transcended."

  "Right," said Keith.

  "Take another look at the end of The Red Badge. Get on the Web and search out the phrase 'moral equivalent of war.'"

  Keith looked up at him from the act of writing it down. "Isn't that a cliché?" he asked.

  "It's a cliché when politicians use it because they don't know what it means. Otherwise it remains a living insight. Write me something about it for extra credit. See if you can do a search for the origin of the phrase."

  "My girlfriend's a kind of a hacker."

  "Good," Michael said. "As long as she doesn't write the paper for you."

  Michneicki packed up his notebook and his copy of Crane. Before he left, Michael said, "Ask her if she knows how to get around a password."

  "Whoa," the youth said. "I don't know if she's that kind of hacker."

  5

  IN THE COURSE of the spring semester, Norman Cevic managed to introduce himself to Lara and ask her to lunch. They met at a dichromatically jacked-up space called Chequers with a Q, an eating house that would prove to be a local inevitability. The place catered to middle management from the handful of high-tech plants that clustered around the university. It supported a large tank full of illuminated tropical fish and for years had offered a busy, pretentious array of precooked "cuisine" that arrived at the kitchen frozen in plastic bags inside cardboard boxes, like low-grade trail mix. Subscribers to the boxed food also served the bloated lyrical menu, which was full of jokey, familiar insolence at the expense of the clientele. There were smiley managers to curse under their breath at the staff, but no cooks.

  When Norman arrived Lara eased their conversation toward the subject of Michael.

  "A good guy," Norman said. "Good."

  "That's rare," she said.

  "I wonder how rare. There's absolutely no statistical data."

  "The anecdotal evidence is troubling, no?"

  Norman, amused, pounded the bottom of a salt shaker. "Yes it is. But without reliable numbers we're flying blind."

  "Why do you say he's good?"

  "Well, let's see. He keeps his promises. He thinks about what he does. He's considerate, concerned with other people. He's a good teacher and he works hard." Norman paused to dip his fries in ketchup. "That's a start. Boy," he said, "I like the french fries here."

  "Yes, they're quite well done. What else is he? Besides good."

  "Married."

  "So?" Ambushed, she flubbed and fluttered. "That's nothing to me, I assure you."

  "I knew that," Norman said. "I assure you." He made her endure his leer. "Gee," he said, "you're actually blushing."

  "To ask about a colleague..."

  "Sure, sure," Norman said. "When I say he's married I'm not kidding. He's ruled by a strong woman. His life is circumscribed. Really," Norman said, "she's good for him. He's a lucky man." He looked thoughtful. "She truly is a great woman. Damned attractive too."

  Lara shrugged to express her conditional acceptance of the possibility. He was plainly Kristin's admirer, which did not necessarily make him her friend.

  "You know," Norman said, "they're giving a party next week. They're supposed to anyway—it's their turn to buy the booze. Not that Kristin wants to. But this time I think she has to play hostess."

  "Going?"

  He nodded without looking at her. Nearby, the Lions Club was having lunch. A little banner was in the middle of the table. It reminded her, absur
dly, of the island. And it reminded her also that St. Trinity was a place as alien to her—more alien—than the forest around them now. In her St. Trin, Lions Clubs were significant. A former president had once drowned most of the membership off a principal tourist beach.

  "If one of Kristin's compulsory parties is your idea of a good time," Norman said, "you can go as my date."

  She thought about it for a moment. How amusing it would be. "Dear Norman," she said. "I should be delighted."

  As it turned out, things were really not so bad. A woman named Arabella sang and played Schubert on the household piano, whereupon her husband recited Sonnet 128: "How oft when thou, my music, music play'st..."A sad, red-faced man named Mahoney drank alone. A young couple in exile from Manhattan talked to Norman about American policy in the Caribbean. Lara waited for the part about how George Bush the First had planned to sabotage the Panama Canal Treaty, but that had been dropped from the routine.

  In Lara's eyes, Michael shone. He was drily funny and rather quiet, though he drank almost as much as the roseate Mahoney. His drinking surprised her. It was also being observed with disapproval by Kristin Ahearn.

  She was tall and slim, with jet-black hair flecked with gray and eyes of a dramatic shade, the color of faded blue flannel. Her lips were pale, thin and unadorned. Big-boned was a suitable term for her; her bones were everywhere in evidence, like the yoke of collarbone that swelled beneath the ivory skin of her décolletage above the low-cut academic-gypsy velvet blouse. Her long lissome lower quarters were sheathed by a beige skirt in the same volkisch style: suede, wide-belted, tight at the hips, flaring around the knees and high enough to show her tough laced boots. A lofty, steel-eyed bitch, and she did not think much of the company, Lara included.

  One thing was puzzling. Her social energy that night was concentrated on the nervous overseeing of her handsome husband. From that accusatory focus, all that seemed to distract her was the close presence of Norman Cevic. When he was near, it seemed to Lara, this tower of ivory was prey to little tremors and fidgets. A hand to the midnight-black hair, a cocking of the pelvis that shifted her contrapuntal stance. Even a little wiggle. And although it was probably Lara's imagining, it seemed to her that as Kristin leaned into Norman's space to hang upon his words, she could just possibly be angling a few soft inches of substantial, velvet braless bod where he might find them.