Bay of Souls (12 page)

"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 Argentine 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."

O
N 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 stood 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.

The Germans were lumpy-faced and broad-shouldered, clear-eyed and scrubbed. Their young folk were freckled and fair, possessed, it seemed, of a radiant innocence.

Across the church, he saw a man named Harold Lawlor, who with his wife, Frances, constituted the dynamic of the local anti-abortion struggle. Michael put his glasses on and assumed an easy stance from which he thought he might observe Mr. Lawlor at his Sabbath devotions, telling his beads, eyes raised in the Maiden's Prayer.

Lawlor's elderly cousin, a man named Brennan, had shot a priest in South Dakota—crippled him for life—for permitting a twelve-year-old girl to assist at Mass. Brennan had insisted on altar boys; it was said he had spent the day of the shooting stalking the twelve-year-old, whose young life was preserved from his nine-millimeter bullet by chance. The plea had been Alzheimer's. Brennan was eighty and had died the same year. A martyr.

Watching Mr. Lawlor's watery blue eyes fixed on the numinous, Michael gave way to a spasm of rage; his jaw trembled. His fists contracted to claws. He had to remind himself that this man was not the shooter. As Michael watched, he completed the last decade of his rosary. Oh, the sorrowful mysteries! thought Michael. Lawlor crossed himself with the chaplet's crucifix, kissed it and fixed his rheumy gaze once more on unending bliss.

The celebrant priest, short, square Father Schlesinger, read scripture.

"I will go to the altar of God," he declared. And the pale, buzz-cut server, kneeling with the soles of his Reeboks toward the congregation, replied, "To God who giveth joy to my youth."

Beside Michael, Paul was praying. Decently, head down, following the order in his missal. The storms of impending adolescence had for the moment subsided. From the look of him, Michael thought, he was making contact. Casting the line up there, bending the reverent eye on vacancy, discoursing with the idle air. He saw the boy clasp his hands to his chest the way he had as a small child, and indeed, as far as Michael could tell, took hold of something and hugged it to his heart. Acknowledged and confessed it, rejoiced and partook. Outside, spring birds that should not have been present at that latitude warbled and trilled.

On his left sat Kristin; Michael saw that she too was watching Paul as he prayed. They could not take their eyes away. Their son was alive, the guest, like everyone, of random singularity. Random singularity, a mere machine, required no sacrifice. Yet around them secrets ascended with the incense and song. The farmers and clerks and cops, the professors, the young women on their own, all of them fought to merge their desperate inner lives with the peace that, it was written, passed understanding.