Bay of Souls Page 9

  "Claro que sí. Tough to get accommodations there, but we did it."

  They smiled at each other. There was no further searching.

  "Para servirle," the woman said.

  Lara spent as little time as she could in front of mirrors. She did what she could to dull the scents of Northwest Airlines and made herself relax. The search, she reminded herself, was for cameras and recorders, not for weapons. It had not come to that.

  All at once she found the mirror held her. She looked into her own dark, almost green eyes. On the island, in the parts where she was remembered, it was believed that Lara had no soul.

  Many believed it. People said her dead brother kept her soul with him under the waters of All Saints Bay. In Guinee. They said that he had offered it to Marinette, the wild woman whose murderous rage had made her a petro goddess centuries ago. They said that Marinette occupied and enslaved her.

  It was also speculated that her husband, a living man, the Red Frenchman, kept it; that Fidel himself, a santero and servant of Elegua, kept it in an emerald. Or that Marinette, in some spectral reversal, had taken it to Africa, where it labored digging for emeralds, to atone for Lara's family's mistreatment of their slaves, and that was why Lara always appeared tired and could not always remember the things that had happened or what she had done.

  At the worst of times, when it seemed impossible, when she dreamed of La Marinette night after night, when she wanted to die, Lara went to the mirror and begged and laughed and cried for her soul. Sometimes she sang, French songs, African songs, Jim Morrison. Sometimes, like the servant she had seen that day, she had to swallow her songs. Once, in front of the mirror, she had tried to hang herself. Hard work, day and night, in the mirror without a soul.

  There were times she could swear she did not appear there, when the person was unknown and the room some dreadful room adorned with coral fans and armor, altars to the Virgin and Child, or to other figures perhaps—Mamaye, Agwé, Elegua, Ogoun. Maroon saints, mutated Taino predators, their lizard tongues pressed against the mirror for a taste of the pale fishbelly white, her soul in Guinee.

  There was one thing, one hope. No one had ever said her soul was forever lost to her, not forever. And there were times, plenty of times, when she did not believe such things at all. As a little girl it had been all right. The first few times, when she saw La Marinette or Guinee in her mirror in the years before, she had laughed. She had made it a game to terrorize the girls in her Swiss school, to make them see her as exotic, bad and dangerous. When she went back to the island, Sister Margaret Oliver, who had her own beliefs about the mysteries, told Lara not to worry.

  On her way downstairs Lara saw portraits on the walls that had not been there during her last visit, the sort that looked painted from photographs. George Orwell. Arthur Koestler. A few patriarchal figures she did not recognize but who she guessed were Latin American military men. One might have been Pinochet.

  Downstairs, something like a board meeting had been taking place. About a dozen men in Italian suits were drifting out of the conference room. There were Anglos, Hispanics, a few Afro-Latins. All were men, and a few she recognized. There was a young Haitian American who worked on the staff of a senator. Also a good-looking Cuban American lobbyist who, it was said, had written every line of nearly every bill introduced by certain members of Congress for the last ten years. His prose reflected the interests of his clients, who were frequently offshore corporations. The men stood in groups around the reception room while the butler ordered up their cars.

  The Cuban approached her. Frightened as she was, it was good to see him. She always had a weakness for Cuban charm.

  "Hi, Lara. Traveling south?"

  She shrugged and kissed him.

  "In a good cause, I hope."

  "Semana santa," she told him, for some reason.

  "Shall I introduce you before everyone's gone?"

  "No," she said. "It's hopeless."

  He wished her buena suerte. She wished him the same. He held her eyes for a moment. She greeted the Haitian American Senate staffer, a young man of the elite. The two men turned away to speak with each other and another man she knew joined them, an American who represented some evangelical foundation.

  "So," the Cuban American told his colleagues, "I said to them, Listen, you don't want that guy on the Foreign Relations Committee. Why? Hey, the guy's an Árabist. We want him out of there. ûndale, fucker."

  "But Pablo," the smooth Haitian American said, "he's not an Arabist at all. It simply isn't true."

  "I beg your pardon," the lobbyist said. "He wears little pointed shoes. I sat next to him on the subway. They curl up at the ends. He's a Muslim terrorist. His opponent is a God-fearing yokel, un hombre muy formal. This is the war on terror."

  The American, a God-fearing yokel by profession, laughed agreeably. Lara, smiling, took a chair to wait for Triptelemos and tried to listen to other conversations. Men spoke in English, Spanish, French.

  She saw some members of a scholarly organization that had flourished in the Reagan era. They were a remnant now, but once they'd had money and power to spare, and Lara, following her ex-husband's lead, had gone to work for them, attached herself after leaving the great Desmond Jenkins and the service of Soviet disinformation. By then, no one cared who had killed Hammarskjöld, that Mobutu dined on human flesh. South Africa was giving way, the truncheon falling from the Boer's ham hand. There was a slaughter of the Eritreans; Cuban soldiers brought AIDS home with their Orders of the Red Banner. Islam appeared, rampant.

  She and her husband ended up assigned to a catchall outfit, run by fanatics, increasingly short on money and power, increasingly lawless. It had been a mistake; they had been badly handled by the French, who had no use for them and passed them to the Americans, by which time the Cold War in Africa had shrunk to a few plague spots of starvation and murder, marginal in the world's eye. But it was all she had been able to promote from the free world end of the great blighted battlefield of Phantom World War Three.

  For his friends, the Haitian American read archly from the translated newsletter of a right-wing racial nationalist on a colonial island who reportedly had been receiving funds from every major intelligence agency in the world.

  "It's called 'Le Message du Soleil," the young man explained, and read on:

  "'The African sun alone was the quickener of the civilized instinct. From Africa, it spread to the Fertile Crescent. But, hélas, not before it attracted the attention of cold pale dwarfs, a stunted race, mean of size and frigid of heart. Cunning and cruel. I refer to those known to the world as Caucasoids, otherwise as blancs. The white race, enfin!

  "Present company excepted," the young Haitian paused to say.

  "Wait a minute," one of the Americans said. "This is our guy?"

  "Big tent, Arthur. Many mansions." The young man looked at them for leave to read on.

  "'Yet the sun alone,'" he continued, "'was font and symbol of vitality. Thus, in an outburst of energy, one leader of the whites, perhaps the most gifted, took as his sign a dim stick figure of the sun. For what was the cross, my friends, if not the sun? And in his hands twisted it to its true likeness, to invoke the bright bounty of the great star itself.'

  "He means the swastika," the dapper young man added helpfully.

  "Yes, I caught that," the Cuban said.

  The Haitian kid cleared his throat.

  "'Rousing his crippled race to demoniac energy in its name. This leader so wickedly great, one—all—must admire him. Even as one recognizes him as the foe to emulate. So one day, as the trumpet notes sounded for Siegfried, the drums shall proclaim a leader for the sons and daughters of the great sun, the children of Amon Ra. Though I shall not be here to see it, in my soul's vision I see it now!'"

  "My word!" said the American.

  "That's just the way he sees it, Arthur. He's a good man."

  "Adiós and farewell!"

  Lara recognized the voice she had been dreading. He was an Argen
tine former military officer named Marcial Pérez, who liked to call himself Triptelemos.

  "May our affairs prosper." He went to stand at the door and sent them off with abrazos. Not everyone who braced for an abrazo received one.

  Once there had been a great secret coming and going, people leaving by separate doors without formality. But now the men from Triptelemos's meeting ambled casually past the butler to wait for their drivers. Perhaps the organization had stopped trying to conceal its influence and was trying to magnify it. Heretofore money had been collected in secret, but that might change, Lara thought.

  When no one but Lara and Triptelemos remained, he approached, half bowed and kissed her hand.

  "Did you see them admire you on their way out?" he asked her. "They thought, Who is this mysterious beauty?"

  Lara laughed. "I could have told them, one of many. Just another mysterious beauty on the big estancia."

  Triptelemos ordered tea and they adjourned to a small parlor to have it; English tea, Belgian waffle cookies.

  "I always imagined 'waffle' was an American word," he told her. He repeated it, waddling his jowls. "Waffle. Invented in Pittsburgh when a foreman spills his lunch on the factory's iron floor."

  When she did not respond he said, "So sorry about your brother. Everyone expected you to go down for the funeral."

  "I couldn't," she said. "I mourn him, believe me. But the place I teach, it would have been difficult getting someone to fill in. And I'm new. I mean, it was impossible, believe it or not."

  "I believe it," Pérez Triptelemos said. Triptelemos was a name he had acquired on acid many years before, although he looked not at all the type. He claimed he'd been given the LSD by Arthur Koestler, who had known Timothy Leary. She thought he might have got it in Buenos Aires from a CIA collaborator with the dirty war. His play name had something to do with spreading grain, fighting communism. An acid vision. He believed in some variety of neofascist revolution, and Lara had found herself one of his mysterious beauties.

  "We expected after your brother's death that there would be something for us."

  "You know, I guess, we're selling the hotel? Roger is dealing with my brother's collection of island art. I'll be going down to help with that."

  "We wondered," the officer said. "What about the rest? We have to pay the Colombians."

  Lara understood that the hotel organization had connected itself with one of the right-wing Colombian militias. Her brother had worked with them. They had used the hotel and the island in their operations, although Lara made it her business to know as little as possible about it.

  "Roger's running things now," she told Colonel Trip.

  "Roger? Oh yes, Roger." He seemed to laugh good-naturedly. "Roger." As though he were taking satisfaction in his benign tolerance for all mankind.

  "John-Paul trusted him."

  "Therefore we do the same. There's a ceremony of commemoration, is there not? Perhaps I'll attend."

  She stood amazed, afraid she must have gone pale. That he would be on the island! The thought petrified her.

  He patted her hand. "Only in spirit. I wouldn't dream of intruding on those rituals."

  "You've been kind to us," Lara said.

  "Our work ... this part of it is coming to an end. But there will be other strategies and other battles. Compañeros fight on in Colombia. With your brother gone, we vouchsafe our trust to you and the Colombian brotherhoods."

  "You know, Triptelemos, I've left the work. We're selling."

  "Yes, I know." He went in his pocket and took out a jewelry box. When he opened it, she saw the emerald and took it out.

  "Señor!" She looked at him, and with the look mustered all the supine female deference of which her mind and body were capable. Her soul was in reserve.

  "It's African," she said. "It has the oil." She ogled it until her eyes watered. "Oh, señor!" She leaned forward and they kissed with both cheeks.

  "Now you have to tell me," he said to her. "You must be truthful. Did Fidel give one to you?"

  She only smiled.

  He lowered his eyes. "I'm indiscreet."

  He began to talk about the situation on St. Trinity. Even without her assistance he seemed well informed.

  "You know the American presence down there is extensive. The intelligence services of the old regime can't even tell us where they are. Wherever Junot's army is in the field, the yanquis are with him. They seem to control the roads. So you and Roger will have to get on with Junot. The Americans ask him everything."

  She wanted to tell him it meant nothing to her. Of course she knew better. Ironic, she thought, that a charmless torturer like Trip should appeal to one's confiding impulses.

  "So," he said, "Junot will speak to the Americans, the ones who matter. Roger Hyde will speak to the Colombian militias."

  "Roger is almost ready to retire. When the hotel is sold he'll return to Mexico." That was the way she wanted things to go.

  "Perhaps he can cooperate for a while. A few stones to the malls of Boca and Hilton Head. Until the debt is paid."

  Lara nodded. When the interview was over, the man who called himself Triptelemos clicked his heels, in the style of his national army.

  "Good luck with your American protectors," Colonel Trip said. His saying it alarmed her. It made her wonder how much he truly knew.

  Triptelemos, they said, had read French poetry to the people he was taking out to drop, alive, into the South Atlantic. His crew would push them out at the moment the disk of the sun disappeared over the horizon. Or else the moment the disk appeared. He had a handkerchief to dry their tears. Sometimes it was a wife's handkerchief, the scent suddenly recognized by the condemned, a cruel recall in the dazzle of the horizon. Or that of a husband, or a mother.

  "I confound the wise professors," Triptelemos liked to say. "I make the machos cry.

  "Sometimes," he would say, "they are so like children. Children again, and I am their father. 'Papi?' Sniveling, no sarcasm now. 'Are there sharks?' We would reassure them. 'In the South Atlantic? Off this continent? Never. You will see.'"

  It was after ten when she arrived at her suite at the Mayflower. In time for the last subway, she went out. Nobody seemed to be observing, but it was finally impossible to tell. Walking toward Dupont Circle, she found a public telephone and called the dummy number.

  On Connecticut Avenue she took the subway to the Zoo, then walked back toward Kalorama. There was an Ethiopian restaurant on Newark Street, still open, still serving a mixed clientele of East Africans and Washington After Dark. In a rear booth, a young woman in jogging clothes was drinking nonalcoholic beer. She had long, straight black hair, quite dark skin and Semitic features. The woman really might be anything, Lara thought, taking a seat across the table from her.

  "So what's this?" the woman asked her.

  "This is life after John-Paul."

  "Yeah, we know that," the young woman said. "Tough. AIDS, right?"

  "So," Lara said, "this is, We never did what you thought we did."

  "Fuck you didn't."

  "We never did what you thought we did. People on the Hill could have told you that."

  "Uh-huh? Oh really?"

  "And we are out of it now. Out of it because we're selling the place. I mean, check it out."

  "You know what? You're not out of it. We'll tell you when you're out of it. My man got your ass skinny-dipping with Fidel on his wall. Picture's right under Mr. President's. You owe us something."

  "I take a risk, you see. To set the record straight."

  "We keep the records. We'll set you straight."

  "You're so rude," Lara said.

  "Yeah," said the young woman. "We're just policemen. We don't have the background."

  9

  ON A SPRINGLIKE Sunday full of sparkling sunlight and warm confiding breezes, the Ahearn family went to Mass. A little before ten o'clock, the three of them trooped up the slate steps of St. Emmerich's. It was a white wooden church whose central structure st
ood flanked by twin pointed towers tipped with Prussian blue. St. Emmerich's was a German foundation, different in every subtle way from the Frenchified Irish church across town.

  They went single file, Kristin tall in the lead. One step behind, Michael trudged eyes down, containing his sick hangover. Young Paul followed him, looking abstracted and melancholy, occasionally rousing himself to a few moves of the insolent swagger he was trying to practice unobserved. He had brought it home from school.

  At the top of the steps, Michael turned to look at him.

  "What's the matter with you? You have a sore back or something?"

  Paul straightened up but declined to answer. Watching closely, Michael thought he saw a second's glint of unfocused defiance.

  He followed his wife into the sensory explosion of stale incense, varnish, old wood and lilies. The church interior was a pattern of grays, no sculpted altar but a stark table, the simple mensa, on which two candles burned. Each opaque gray window held a single decorated pane showing a stylized icon. Behind the sacrificial table a sanctuary lamp glowed before a gray banner displaying the Chi-Rho.

  Michael stepped aside to let his wife and son into the rear pew he had chosen. Paul genuflected and crossed himself. Michael and Kristin blundered into eye contact, exchanged a bleak unseeing glance and sat down.

  From his place Michael could watch the church fill. There was always a small colorful contingent from the university. The aged Professor Doroshenko, a philologist and an immensely learned authority on Slavic myth, led his failing wife to a place near the front. The professor's many tomes on wood sprites and river elves were regularly released by an émigré press in Winnipeg. Behind the Doroshenkos Mr. Giorgio and Mr. Cushing, a pair of middle-aged gay librarians of signal piety, knelt in prayer. Beside them sat Dr. Almeida with his wife and four of his children. The prolific doctor was a Goan and a savant at the computer center. Then there were the few dozen students, whom the church did its best to make welcome. They were mostly young women, away from home for the first time.

  The rest of the congregation consisted of the townies and farmers. Three, sometimes four generations, descendants of the nineteenth-century Rhenish and Bohemian settlers, still showed up each week, ancients and babes in arms. The rural churches were being closed and consolidated; circuit-riding priests equipped with folding communion sets and cassettes of Tennessee Ernie's Sacred Songs spent long weekends holding Mass in half a dozen ruinous sanctuaries among the rows of soybeans. Only a scant fraction of the family farms remained out there.