Ann Patchett (15 page)

“Well, it would have all been pretty
meaningless if you hadn’t been there to tell them what I was saying. I would
have been just another woman screaming.”

“You made things very clear.”

“To think they wanted to shoot him.” She let go
of his hand.

“I am glad,” Gen said, but then he stopped,
trying to think of what there was to be glad about. “I am glad that your friend
had some peace. I’m sure they will send him home soon.”

“Yes,” she said.

Gen and Roxane each imagined the accompanist
going home, as in sitting up in a seat by the window of a plane, looking out at
the clouds that pooled over the host country.

“My employer, Mr. Hosokawa, asks me to offer
you his condolences. He wanted me to tell you that your accompanist was very
talented. We were honored to hear him play.”

She nodded. “He’s right, you know,” she said. “Christopf
was very good. I don’t suppose people notice the accompanist very often. That’s
kind of him to say.
Your employer.”
She
raised
up her open hand to Gen. “He gave me his
handkerchief.” It was a small white flag crushed into her palm. “I’m afraid
I’ve ruined it. I don’t think he’d want it back now.”

“Of course he would want you to have it.”

“Say his name again for me.”

“Ho-so-kawa.”

“Hosokawa,” she said, nodding. “It was his
birthday.”

“Yes. He is feeling very sorry about that as
well. He has a great sense of responsibility.”

“That it was his birthday?”

“That you and your friend came here to perform
for him. He feels that you are trapped here because of him, that perhaps your
friend—” Again Gen stopped. There was no point in being so explicit. From this
close, her face looked very young, very much like a girl’s, with her clear eyes
and long hair. But he knew she was at least ten years older than he was,
somewhere in her late thirties.

“You tell Mr. Hosokawa for me,” she said. She
stopped to pin some of her hair back away from her face. “What the hell. It
isn’t like I’m so busy I can’t tell him myself. Does he not speak English?
Well, you’ll translate. You’re the only one of us around here who has a job
now. Are there any languages you don’t speak?”

Gen smiled at the very thought of such a thing,
the towering list of languages he didn’t speak. “Most of them I don’t speak a
word of,” he said. He stood up and Roxane Coss put her hand on his arm to walk
across the room as if she might faint. It was a possibility. She had had a very
hard day. All around the room the men raised their heads and ended their
conversations to watch them, the tall young Japanese translator navigating the
wide expanse of living room with the soprano on his arm. How strange and lovely
it was to see her hand resting on the top of his sleeve, her pale fingers
nearly reaching his wrist.

When Mr. Hosokawa, who had been trying to look
the other way, realized that Gen was bringing Roxane Coss to him, he felt a
deep blush coming up from the collar of his shirt and he stood to wait for her
arrival.

“Mr. Hosokawa,” Roxane said, and held out her
hand to him.

“Miss Coss,” he said, and bowed.

Roxane took one chair and Mr. Hosokawa took the
other. Gen pulled up a third, smaller chair and waited.

“Gen has told me you feel in some way
responsible for this,” she said.

Mr. Hosokawa nodded. He spoke to her with great
honesty, the kind two people use after a lifetime of knowing one another. But
what was a lifetime?
This afternoon?
This evening?
The kidnappers had reset the clocks and no one
knew a thing about time anymore. Better this once to be inappropriate and
honest as the burden of his guilt was tightening a string around his throat. He
told her he had declined many invitations from the host country but then agreed
to come once they told him she would be there. He told her he had never had any
plans of helping this country. He told her he was a great admirer of her work
and named the cities he had seen her in. He told her he must be in some part
responsible for the death of her accompanist.

“No,” she said. “No. I sing in so many places. It’s
rare that I would sing for a private party like this. To tell you the truth,
most people don’t have the money, but I’ve done it before. I didn’t come here
for your birthday. With all respect, I didn’t even remember whose birthday it
was. Besides, from what I understand, these people didn’t even want you, they
wanted the President.”

“But I was the one who set this thing in motion,”
Mr. Hosokawa said.

“Or did I?” she said. “I thought about
declining. I declined several times until they came up with more money.” She
leaned forward, and when she did, Gen and Mr. Hosokawa ducked their heads down
as well. “Don’t get me wrong. I am very capable of blame. This is an event ripe
for blame if ever I saw one. I just don’t blame you.”

The members of LFDMS could have opened all the
doors at that moment, thrown down their guns and told everyone to go, and Mr.
Hosokawa would not have experienced any greater sense of relief than the one he
had knowing Roxane Coss forgave him.

Several of the foot soldiers came around with
the bags that Messner had brought in on the accompanist’s gurney and
distributed sandwiches and cans of soda, wrapped slices of dark cake and
bottled water. If nothing else, the food seemed to be in great abundance and
when they took one sandwich each the boy shook the bag at them, urging them
wordlessly to reach in for more. Or maybe there was simply more for them
because they were sitting with Roxane Coss.

“It looks like I’ll stay for supper,” she said,
unwrapping
the white paper like a present. Inside the
heavy slabs of bread there was a piece of meat, orangish-red with sauce or
watery peppers. Its juice dripped into the paper which she spread across her
lap. The two men waited for her to begin, but they didn’t have to wait for
long. She ate like she was starving. “There are people who would like to have a
picture of this,” she said, lifting up the sandwich. “I’m very particular about
my food.”

“We make exceptions in extraordinary times,”
Mr. Hosokawa said, and Gen translated. He was pleased to see her eating,
pleased that her grief had not overwhelmed her in any way that could endanger
her health.

For Gen, the oily piece of meat (which animal?)
inside stained bread made him stop and consider exactly how hungry he was. He
was hungry. He turned his head away from Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa, afraid
of the orange grease on his lips. But before he had the chance to eat even half
of his sandwich, one of the boys wearing a green baseball cap came for him. They
were just starting to become distinguishable, these boys. This one had a cap
with a photo button of Che Guevara on it, another wore a knife on his chest,
one
more had a cheap scapula of the Sacred Heart tied high
up on his throat with a string. Some of the boys were very big or very small, a
few had a handful of whiskers sprouting on their chins,
others
had acne. The boy that Gen had noticed with Roxane had a face like a fine-boned
Madonna. The boy that came for him now told Gen in
a Spanish
so rudimentary that it was a struggle to understand, that the Generals would
see him now.

“Forgive me,” he said in English and Japanese,
wrapping up what was left of his meal and putting it discreetly beneath a chair
in hopes it would still be there when he returned. He had especially wanted the
cake.

General Hector used a pencil to take notes on a
yellow tablet. He was extremely meticulous about his writing.

“Name?”
General Alfredo asked a man sitting
on a red ottoman near the fireplace.

“Oscar Mendoza.” The man took his handkerchief
out of his pocket and wiped his mouth. He was finishing off a piece of cake.

“Any identification?”

Mr. Mendoza took out his wallet, found a
driver’s license, a credit card, pictures of his five daughters. General Hector
copied down the information. He wrote down his address. General Benjamin picked
up the pictures and studied them. “Occupation?” he said.

“Contractor.”
Mr. Mendoza did not like them
having his address. He lived only five miles from here. He had planned on
bidding to build the factory that he had been told Mr. Hosokawa had come to his
country to develop. Instead he had slept on a floor, said good-bye to his wife
and his grand string of girls for who knew how long, and had to consider the
possibility that he might be shot.

“Your health?”

Mr. Mendoza shrugged. “Good enough I would
think. I’m here.”

“But do you know?” General Benjamin said, trying
to remember the tone that the doctor had taken with him when he had gone to the
city years before to see about his shingles. “Do you have any conditions?”

Mr. Mendoza looked as if he were being asked
about the internal workings of his wristwatch. “I wouldn’t know.”

Gen came along behind them and waited while
they asked a few more questions, all of them remarkable only in what unhelpful
answers they engendered. They were trying to get rid of more hostages. They
were trying to discern who else might be dying. The death of the accompanist
had made them nervous. The crowd outside, which had quieted for a while, had
begun to bellow again once they saw the body tucked inside its white
tablecloth.
“
Mur
-der!
Mur
-der!” they chanted. From the street there came a
constant barrage of bullhorned messages and demands. The phone rang and rang
and rang with would-be negotiators. Soon, all of the terrorists were going to
have to be allowed to sleep. The Generals were bickering in some shorthand
nonsense that Gen couldn’t follow. General Hector stopped the argument by
taking out his pistol and shooting the clock on the mantel. There were too many
people to watch, even with the crowd cut in half. They went from man to man,
asking, printing down the answers and names. Gen served in the cases where
Spanish was not understood. It was the foreigners they placed their hopes on
anyway.
Foreign governments willing to pay foreign ransoms.
The Generals
were having
to rethink their failed
mission. If they couldn’t get the President, then there should still be
something in it for their troubles. They planned to talk to every hostage in
the room, to assess and rank them to see who would be most beneficial in
getting comrades released from high-altitude prisons, for getting money for the
cause. But the polling process lacked science. The guests played down their own
importance when questioned.

“No, I don’t run the company, not exactly.”

“I am only one member on a board of many.”

“This diplomatic post is not as it seems. It
was arranged by my brother-in-law.”

No one was quite willing to lie, but they
tugged down the edges of the truth. The note-taking made them nervous.

“All of this information will be checked by our
people on the outside,” Alfredo said again and again, and Gen translated it
into French and German, Greek and Portuguese, each time careful to say
their
people outside. Something a translator should never
do.

In the middle of an interview with a Dane who
was thought to be a potential backer for the nonexistent Nansei project, General
Benjamin, the upper right portion of his faces in flames, turned to Gen. “How
did you get to be so smart?” he said in an accusatory tone, as if there was a
secret cache of intelligence hidden somewhere in the house that Gen was
hoarding all for himself.

Gen felt tired, not smart. He felt hungry.
Sleep was singing him lullabies. He longed for what was left of his sandwich.
“Sir?” he said. He could see Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane Coss sitting quietly
together, unable to speak because their translator was busy with the
terrorists’ footwork.

“Where did you learn so many languages?”

Gen had no interest in telling his story. Was
his sandwich still beneath the chair?
The cake?
He was
wondering whether or not they would qualify for release and feeling a sad
resignation in the knowledge they would not. “University,” he said simply, and
turned his eyes back to the man they were questioning.

When they made their lists of those to keep and
those to send away, Gen should have been on the top of the list to go. He was
worth no money, he had no leverage. He was as much an employee, a workingman,
as the ones who had fine-sliced the onions for dinner. But when the lists were
drawn up his name did not appear anywhere. He was somehow beneath their thought
altogether. Not that he would have gone without Mr. Hosokawa. He would have
chosen to stay like that young priest, but everyone likes to be asked. Once the
interviews were completed and the final decisions were made it was late in the
evening. All around the room lamps were clicked on. Gen was given the task of
making copies of the lists. He had somehow become the secretary to the whole
event.