The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (11 page)

I’ve heard you’re the kind of man who can’t stand the thought of a killer going free.

Just about every killer I’ve ever met in Haiti is dancing around in the streets, having
a good laugh. Some of them even happen to be your assets.

The elevator opened on the ground floor and Tom’s fellow passenger caught the closing
door as Harrington stepped out into the hall. I know you’re the type of man who can’t
look the other way, he said with a wink. You know what I’m saying.

Harrington began to walk toward the chairs in the waiting area. He took a seat, nodding
at the receptionist behind her desk, who picked up a ringing phone and nodded back
at him and said, Excuse me, are you Mr. Harrington? holding out the receiver. It’s
for you.

Mr. Harrington, said the voice in the phone, this is Special Agent Woodrow Singer.
I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee. Alone, if you don’t mind.

Let me get back to you on that, said Harrington, returning the receiver to the receptionist.
When he turned around, there was a black man occupying his former chair, sphinxlike,
his eyes obscured behind a wrap of sunglasses, a chain of fat gold links around his
neck, oversized rings on his long fingers, pink scar on the side of his chin. Haitian,
Harrington had to believe, and of course thug, except for the fact he wore a lanyard
around his neck from which hung an embassy security badge. Harrington sat down, keeping
an empty seat between them, and grimaced. The black man shifted in his chair toward
him as if he might speak, but didn’t. Harrington, staring back at him, finally did.

You want to tell me something, right?

He spoke with a Brooklyn accent in flawless and customarily vague Kreyol. His business
was narcotics.
Production or distribution?
asked Harrington, but the joke went unappreciated. In this business, the fellow said
in a low voice, he had been watching certain people, a man and a woman and another
man, you know who I am talking about, he said, and these people were doing this thing,
and it was his business to stop these people from doing this thing, but each time
he tried to stop them, other people stopped him from stopping them. Do you understand,
mon ami
?

Yeah, said Harrington, these people you were watching had very big friends.

Exactement, monsieur
.

And you are saying that this man who I came here with today knew this woman, this
dead woman.

Exactement.

But this man has never been to Haiti.

Haiti is not the only place to know this woman.

Okay, thanks, said Harrington, switching to English, and if you see Dolan tell him
I said to go fuck himself, and then he felt himself detach from it all, sleepwalking
through the turbulence, and he went out from the embassy and drove straight to Petionville,
left the SUV that Dolan had rented in the car park of the Hotel Montana with the key
in the ignition, checked out of his room, and then telephoned the airlines only to
learn there were no seats available to Miami until the following day. He booked the
next day’s afternoon flight and then took a taxi to the Oloffson, checked in for the
night, and ate his lunch on the veranda, ignoring familiar faces, remaining at his
table until twilight, speaking off and on with Monsieur Richard, the hotel’s owner,
who came intermittently to sit with him—Have you seen Gerard? No. If you see him tell
him I want to talk to him—and then retired to the bar. Conrad Dolan found him there
later that evening, and threw himself down next to Harrington and said, seething through
clenched teeth, So how many scoops of bullshit were those assholes able to pile on
your cone, Tommy Boy?

You knew the girl, you bastard.

Yeah, I did, and what of it? said Dolan. You killed a guy.

Did I? said Harrington, quick and churlish. Then his stomach tightened and seized
and his voice weakened. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Oh, you wouldn’t know, would you? You never stopped to check it out.

Is that in the report too?

Yeah, said Dolan, waving for the bartender’s attention. I seem to remember something
like that.

CHAPTER EIGHT

You could see it as Tom’s punishment for her, a token administration of penance, his
instructions to Gerard to keep going through Saint-Marc. He wanted to stop instead
at one of the hotels along the Cote des Arcadins where they could sit at a bar in
perfumed shade, immune from the everyday frenzy and crush of a town like Saint-Marc,
the monotonous wearying attention paid to their whiteness. He wanted none of that
tax on his energy this afternoon, but then why did he speak to Gerard in Kreyol if
not to prevent Jackie from understanding the conversation, and of course she was going
to understand it soon enough, pointing out one shop and then a second that looked
like it might sell bottled water or soft drinks, only to be ignored by Gerard while
Tom played dumb. Gerard threaded his way methodically through the rubble of the town’s
central market, the channel of vendors and peasants and animals and trucks and tap-taps
and cyclists opening and closing in front of him, cresting and ebbing against the
sides of the SUV, streaking its dust with their sweat. Finally she snarled at Gerard.
Tom explained what they were doing. Frustrated, she plundered her camera bag for a
lemon drop and sucked on it angrily and loudly for a few seconds. Tom expected her
to stay sulky like the spoiled child he was tempted to believe she was but then she
surprised him and resigned herself to her status as obedient passenger, proceeding
without complaint, stoic and immobile for the next half hour to the coast.

When he saw the sign marking the long entrance to Moulin Sur Mer, Gerard downshifted
but Tom told him keep going, today for some reason he wanted to bypass this preferred
and dependable watering hole in favor of exploring one of the lesser known hotels
farther south, by far more ordinary and modest resorts that he had always wondered
about—who stayed there? Was the service adequate? Were the rooms clean?—but always
flew past on his trips between Port-au-Prince and the north. Visible from the road,
the most modern-looking was a two-storied building of whitewashed stucco and clay-tiled
roof with what he could pretend was Mediterranean appeal; eight or ten units a floor,
he guessed, and imagined small balconies overlooking a poolside bar and a private
strand of beach and the beautiful water. If it had a name, he couldn’t remember, but
as the hotel came into view in a grove of palms and mango trees, Tom told Gerard to
turn in.

The car park was empty, its normal condition, Tom figured, except on weekends. The
glass double doors leading inside were unlocked but the lobby was empty too—deserted,
its check-in counter coated with a layer of grime and the puddled wax of candles,
the splayed wires of a phone line dangling from a wall. But the obvious was never
the final word in Haiti. Somewhere on the premises would be a caretaker married to
a shotgun; otherwise the building would have been cannibalized, antlike, down to its
skeleton, its doors and windows carried away, the frames themselves ripped from their
rough-outs, even the floor tiles pried up, painstakingly cleaned, resold. Jackie wandered
seaward through the breezeway, looking for a bathroom. Tom and Gerard remained in
the lobby, calling out
Bonjour,
expecting someone to come but no one did.

Let’s have a look around, said Tom.

Beyond the breezeway was a concrete patio, its surface webbed with cracks, poured
to accommodate a swimming pool that although emptied remained mysteriously clean,
free of rainwater or leaves or windblown trash. Seaward, behind the pool, the patio
ended in a waist-high block wall, its top row composed of airy arabesques, with a
passageway and railing implying a cliffside stairway down to the beach. The sweep
of the view toward the horizon—the sparkling expanse of the Gonave Bay, the misty
whale-backed hump of the island in its middle—was sublime, a tropic dreamscape, begging
you to imagine the romance meant to unfold on the dilapidated patio: cocktails, dinner
straight from the reefs, dancing with the soothing winds of the sea ruffling your
partner’s hair, an ideal venue for slow, salty, languorous love most anywhere in the
world but Haiti, where love was synonymous with impotence, powerless to keep any of
its dazzling promises, a perverse magnet for wholesale grief, and maybe, Tom thought,
whoever owned this little slice of treacherous paradise had been right to run away
and not look back, if that was the story.

He heard Gerard calling to him and turned, cheered to see him standing behind an outside
bar in a shallow service area recessed below the balconies jutting from a pair of
second-floor rooms. Tom joined him behind the counter and (Gerard was too timorous
for this impropriety) began flipping back the tops along a row of refrigerated aluminum
coolers, but the electricity was off and the bins were empty.

Where’d Jackie go? Tom said.

He called her name with no result and Gerard thought maybe she had gone down the steps
to the
plage.
Together they walked across the patio to the wall and peered over the side without
saying anything, just standing there watching, eyes glued to Jackie, until finally
Gerard snickered and said,
Oo la la
. Tom, you will fuck this woman, eh? I think she would be a good one to fuck.

I don’t think that’s the case at all, he said, surprised by his tone, meaning to express
dismissive amusement but instead he had only sounded offended.

In all fairness to Gerard, Jackie was providing him with every reason to behave otherwise,
but it was unlike the circumspect Gerard to be vulgar about women, especially white
women, because the ones he saw and met in Haiti he most often admired for their courage
and selflessness, their disdain for privilege, and sex was a topic Tom and he almost
never discussed, not in regard to their personal lives, and even those nights on the
road, stuck in Cap-Haïtien or Jacmel or Les Cayes, Tom never said a word when Gerard
would disappear into the darkness in search of an old girlfriend or new girlfriend
or, Tom suspected, anyone at all he could find to take the edge off the all-consuming
substance of death that shaped their days, returning to the hotel at breakfast hungover
and grinning in a most unmarital manner.

On one such occasion, Gerard had stirred his coffee and asked conspiratorially, Tom,
you never look for woman? and Tom had answered grudgingly that Haitian women were
beautiful but AIDS was a problem, wasn’t it? And besides, he was married. To his credit,
Gerard didn’t scoff. But marriage had little to do with Tom’s celibacy. Although he
had not slept with anyone during his time in Haiti he had, in fact, hoped it might
happen not once but twice, the first with the stupendously sexy bartender at the Oloffson,
a girl with the perfectly angled and proportionate features of an Ethiopian princess
and the attitude of a Motown diva, the second at one of the notoriously raunchy television
network parties in an apartment at the Montana, his temporary partner a sleek battle-hardened
senior correspondent from one of the news weeklies intent on cutting loose and having
herself a memorably wicked evening. She was wearing heels and a short black cocktail
dress and invited him to dance by stepping out of her panties and throwing them merrily
in his face. But the bartender wanted a relationship and a visa, not a lover who would
spend more time on airplanes than in her arms, and by the time he escorted the woman
from the magazine back to her room and, in the midst of a slack embrace, they toppled
onto her bed, she was beyond the moment, so cross-eyed, slurry drunk that she lost
consciousness midkiss and, like any gentleman, he withdrew and took himself home and
masturbated.

Despite his desire to the contrary, he never ran into her again. On the other hand
he had no time for this sort of play. Month after month of tracking down witnesses
and survivors, taking depositions, organizing the bone diggers, providing logistical
support for the teams of forensic anthropologists to exhume and catalog the sites,
writing reports for the Haitian government (the palace, the Ministry of Justice),
for the UN Human Rights Commission and the human rights entities of the Organization
of American States, writing reports that he could only pray would find their way into
the hands of legislators and prosecutors, massaging the perpetual crisis of his preposterous
budget, waiting and waiting with a phone to his ear for operators and secretaries
to connect him, to put him through to anybody with a voice, until his neck went stiff
and his arm went numb, and by the end of each unending day it was all he could do
to unknot his bootlaces, brush his teeth and spit and fall, every cell humming with
fatigue, into bed for a few hours—who had time for chasing skirts, for God’s sake?

But now the pace and fire and crusading purpose of those days were dead-ending and
here was Jackie, down below in the water, breathtakingly naked below the waist, boots
and socks, pants and lilac panties, scattered behind her on the sand, the heavenly
slope of her ass agleam from the lick of the sea
. . .
and the temptation was mighty, the torment exquisite.

Yet he had never considered his desire, how he acted on that desire or didn’t, as
anybody’s business but his own, certainly not a topic to be bantered about in testosterone-heated
bonhomie. There was no one—no buddy, no tennis partner, no colleague or old friend,
and definitely not Gerard, an employee—that he wanted to have that conversation with,
one sportsman to another, tallying scores. Years ago, he remembered reading somewhere
that boys talked and men didn’t, and that insight seemed to divide the world of male
sexuality correctly. More to the point, perhaps, the sudden sense of transparency
Tom experienced hearing Gerard’s crude declaration made him wince; he felt caught,
exposed, not necessarily ashamed but chastened, standing there looking down on Jackie
not actually thinking he would sleep with her but beginning to roll out the spool
of justification that might allow for it, tasting the hope of it on the tongue of
his lust, and how many times a day, in an office or on the street or in a restaurant
glancing up from his plate or gazing over the rim of his glass in a bar did he look
at women, all variety of women, and feel just that, and then feel the hunger for what
one cannot have, the eros of everyday life with its miles of locked doors, its unquenchable
desire.

He was a good enough husband and, when he was in place, a better father and did not
like to think of himself as unconscionably adulterous, but he did in fact have a mistress
in South Beach, an erstwhile college girlfriend from Gainesville who had had her fill
of commitment—two marriages, two divorces—and now professed to be satisfied simply
by no-strings sex, safe, amiable, unattached, the passion between them neither obsessive
nor dulled by overuse. The arrangement seemed only right and fair to Tom. Necessary,
like checkups at the family physician. A matter of health and balance and, not to
be dwelled on, abundance. A release of endangering amorphous pressure, in his life
much more than his body, that could not otherwise be released. Was that wrong? Yes.
No. Perhaps. It was difficult to care about the wrongness of it when the rightness
seemed so compelling.

His perfectly lovely, increasingly predictable, sometimes resentful and frustrated
wife, had a waistline expanding at a rate commensurate with her material vision of
what a good life in Miami was intended to encompass and absorb, regardless of how
many times she jogged in slow motion around the neighborhood. Somehow letting it slip
her mind that, Oh, Tom isn’t that type of lawyer, is he? Not the kind whose job description
translates as
raking it in
. But why wasn’t he? Oh, yes, she had momentarily forgotten, he’s trying to save the
fucking world. Bravo, Tom. In my heart I approve but here’s the bill for the wind
damage on the roof, and please phone the plumber because that asshole seems incapable
of returning my calls.

He didn’t object to being middle class, not as a measure of his financial status,
but he was disappointed that her values seemed anchored there, without the raw ingenuity
of the low or the expansive imagination of the high. Tom could be depended upon to
meet all her conventional needs, to support the orthodoxy of her sensible desires.
Having things her way—the quiet neighborhood, the kid’s school, the Swedish cars in
the driveway, the guest list for her overly prepared dinner parties—was a given, what
with his many and prolonged absences, his fidelity to the unnamed dead. Her domestic
will exerted a potent force that he often acquiesced to with only a gesture of resistance,
knowing it would be worse to fight it out, his eventual defeat by definition hers
as well, in possession of a husband who had taken up the habit of being pounded into
submission.

Her needs—he found them impossible to engage with any strong sense of empathy. If
her weekends had a theme, a mission statement, it was,
What do we need right now, this instant, that can no longer be delayed?
Pretty things and comfort and pride and the ever elusive confidence of self-esteem.
But what did it mean, Tom sometimes found himself worrying, if all the abstract dread
he felt about his marriage of fifteen years could be peeled down to its core and there
in the hiss and steam all that remained was sex and its imperatives?

Impossible to know—should he feel horrified or thankful?—but something, hormones or
entropy or both, had diluted the high concentration of erotic Sicilian energy she
had inherited in her blood. Increasingly over the years he had an inconclusive sense
of his wife’s passion for the bedroom. These days, did she ever experience sexual
need? Yes, but. When they had first started living together and before their daughter’s
birth, she would sometimes suggest role-playing games that secretly embarrassed and
intimidated him—he wasn’t her gynecologist and he wasn’t her assailant. At some point
he had missed altogether, oral sex began to disgust her, or maybe it had all along
and she had only resigned herself to the earlier packaging of their lusts. Fellatio
was nothing and everything, depending on his mood, but he resented the scope of their
intimacy being reduced in any of its interlocking parts. And although he could never
keep his thoughts quiet about these things, neither did he want to talk about them,
feared talking about them, feared ever being able to explain himself, feared most
of all the idea that here was the one part of himself that was better off misunderstood
than known and fully understood.