The Boiling Season (31 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

E
ach night, as darkness fell, Dragon Guy and his men continued slipping back out of the estate to resume their clashes in the streets with President Duphay's troops. Each night, from my balcony, I could hear them at the roadblock outside the gate, telling each other jokes and singing obscene songs while they waited to be attacked. My daily schedule began to mirror theirs: up all night and then asleep at dawn.

What did I do during those hours? I had grown adept at following the muddled movements of men and guns. Most of all, I listened for signs that Dragon Guy was finally weakening. It had to be only a matter of time before he ran out of men. If not men, certainly bullets.

I ate little, sometimes waking and going straight to the blind behind Villa Bisset without stopping first at the kitchen. I sat for hours, observing the activity in the courtyard, occasionally moving to a different blind for a view of different villas. It grew so routine that I seldom paused to consider my purpose. What was the point of the notes I was taking? Only, it seemed, that information gave me comfort; it fed the illusion that if I knew enough, I would somehow be able to get them to leave.

One night, while Dragon Guy and his men were out fighting, I decided to leave the safety of my rooms. By the light of the moon I got dressed and made my way out of the manor house. This time I did not use the path I had cut behind Villa Moreau. Tonight, for the first time since Dragon Guy had come to stay, I followed the cobblestones to Madame's private villa.

Unlike all the rest, the courtyard outside Madame's villa betrayed none of the usual signs of habitation. There was no fire ring and no pots and pans. The trees had been spared and there were no vegetable patches. In fact, the trees here had been recently trimmed and someone had thinned out the undergrowth. The stones appeared recently swept. Somehow they had even managed to fill the pool. It was as if the place were being preserved for some special purpose.

Nevertheless, I entered Madame's villa feeling a sense of dread. Yet, from the moment I stepped inside, it was as though Madame had never left. Her perfume bottles stood at attention on her dressing table, along with her old mother-of-pearl brush. Her display of photos in gold and silver frames remained arrayed in a perfect fan on the credenza, as though no one had thought to look at them, lacking even the mildest curiosity about whose home this was. The bed was made. Who among them would know how? I was sure Dragon Guy, until the day he arrived here, had never in his life slept on anything other than a pallet.

Hector. Who else could have taken such good care of things?

In the wardrobe I at last found traces of Dragon Guy—a soiled shirt hanging as though it were a handmade suit. At least he owned a shirt. Beside it dangled an orange dress. There were two pillows on the bed, and each one smelled of someone different. But neither belonged to Hector. It was not here that he slept.

Looking around, I found it inconceivable that a man such as Dragon Guy could so easily take Mme Freeman's place, that such a change could amount to so little. A different wardrobe, a different scent. Everything else the same.

And where, right now, was Mme Freeman? Did she have any idea of what was happening here? No doubt she had been reading about us in her papers; she knew the general outline. Perhaps she was even hoping Dragon Guy would prevail. After everything President Duphay had done to destroy her hotel, she could not be blamed for wanting to see him flee in disgrace. But she could not understand the cost at which that would come. Dragon Guy was anything but a savior, especially for Habitation Louvois.

Even if Madame did not know all of the details, she at least knew the estate and the capital, the terrain upon which the battles were being fought. That was more than I knew of her world. Among the magazines left behind over the years by our guests were one or two dedicated to homes and gardens around the States. Inside were pictures of houses that looked nothing like the Marcuses', nor any other home I had ever seen. What surprised me the most was how bland the majority of them were, white the most common color. Occasionally brick. Somehow, despite all the flowers in neat, vibrant beds, the places seemed lifeless, as if no one actually lived there. And yet I could not help noticing that none of them were ever surrounded with walls.

I found it impossible to imagine Madame strolling such flat, treeless expanses of grass. And what did the stores she shopped in look like? The streets she drove down? Was her company in one of those featureless glass towers? The photos on the credenza showed faces against backdrops of mountains and oceans and beaches, views of Madame and her friends and family on vacation. But on vacation from what?

I closed the wardrobe and returned everything to where I had found it. One thing was certain: she could never know what was happening here. I would have to live with my failings, but I could not live with her discovering that I had allowed a man such as Dragon Guy to poison her most private sanctuary.

On my way back to the manor house I struggled in the dark to avoid tripping on the overgrown underbrush along the paths. I was nearly at Villa Bardot and the last set of steps before the drive when I noticed someone coming toward me. Whoever it was had not yet noticed me, for I had only just turned the bend—but there was nowhere to hide. And then it was too late.

“Is that you, François?” she said as she reached the bottom step.

“Yes,” I said.

She came toward me swiftly, tall and lean. “How do you expect to heal when you're out here limping around?” she said with gentle reproach. “You should be in bed.”

And then she stood directly before me, a young woman with a red kerchief wrapped around her head. I realized she was the one I had seen with Dragon Guy that first day he had arrived. And I knew in an instant the orange dress in Madame's wardrobe belonged to her.

“I couldn't sleep,” I said.

She folded her arms across her chest. She was a head and a half above me, and I could make out her face no better than she could mine.

“Your leg will never heal if you don't rest.”

“Of course,” I said.

She reached out and took my arm, and I assumed a limp as she eased me down the path. I let her lead, and she directed me to Villa Garbo, bringing me right to the door.

“I'll help you into bed,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I can manage from here.”

“Very well.” She took my hand in hers, and I was surprised by the roughness of her skin. “Get some sleep,” she said, “and if I hear you've been out wandering around again, you're going to have to answer to me.” And then she bent down and kissed me on the forehead. I recognized her wild scent.

* * *

I drew a map of the estate, a crude rendering—rectangles and squares to represent the manor and guesthouse, the villas and outbuildings and various other structures. I was reminded of the hotel blueprints from all those years ago, and I was surprised how much I had retained from them. Lines of varying thickness marked the drive and the paths. I made note of the villas Dragon Guy had occupied.

What I realized was that the estate was made up of three parallel sections, all virtually identical in size. The boundary of the first was formed by the drive, and within it was the manor house and the pavilion, the discotheque and casino, the outbuildings and the easternmost villas, those Dragon Guy had left unoccupied. The next section, to the west of the drive, contained the guesthouse and the rest of the villas, and it extended down to the path leading to the preserve, which itself formed the last of the sections.

I knew the hole in the wall was not in the first section. Had it been, at one time or another I would have seen Dragon Guy coming and going. I also knew the hole was not along the south wall of the second section, because it was there that I had cut my path. I knew, in fact, that the hole was not anywhere along the southern wall, because if it had been, Dragon Guy would have used the path leading to the preserve to get to it, and I would have seen him from my blind behind Villa Bacall.

That left only the northern wall, which meant the hole must be deep in the preserve, where the wall butted up against Cité Verd.

The slums gave Dragon Guy the cover he needed.

T
he next morning, while Dragon Guy and his soldiers slept, I snuck into the preserve. It took me only an hour to find the spot where feet had beaten down a trail off the main path.

The hole was just where I expected it to be. Yet how quickly my satisfaction turned to disappointment. What had I expected? Something dramatic, I suppose. Looking at it now, I could not help but laugh at how insignificant a thing it was. Nothing more than a gap where the wall had crumbled, the stones falling inward, scattered by the back and forth of Dragon Guy's men. Two meters wide, no more. That was all it took to transform an impregnable wall into a turnstile.

But it was all there, all the pieces I would need to put it back together again.

T
hat night, after Dragon Guy and his followers had left to continue their fight, I returned to the wall. Down the rugged paths I struggled to navigate an old wheelbarrow in which I had collected a trowel, a bucket filled with glass bottles, and a half-full sack of cement I had found in the shed. With water from the spring I quickly mixed the cement, and then I set to work fitting the stones back into place. The bottles I broke, planting the shards along the top of the reconstructed wall.

Then came the fire. If anyone on the other side saw the flames, they did not come to investigate. The wall baked until dawn, and then, just before I knew Dragon Guy would return—or rather, try to return—I tamped down the embers and I went home to bed.

Chapter Twenty-Five

W
atching from the balcony as they made their way down the drive, it struck me how well each man's weapon seemed to fit his bearing. The strongest—or those who otherwise managed to hold themselves the most erect—possessed an assortment of assault rifles and machine guns, some with pistols in reserve, tucked into their waistbands. Most of the others, thin and ragged, carried whatever they had been able to obtain: shotguns, revolvers, rifles.

But then there were the stragglers, dragging their feet as if they were something old and useless, carrying nothing but machetes.

It was a subdued procession, not at all the triumphant return of conquering warriors. In all there must have been close to two hundred of them. And that did not appear to include any women.

At the lead marched Dragon Guy in his white linen suit, Hector at his side. I knew Raoul was somewhere among them. Who else could have unlocked the gate to let them in? And why had I not thought of that? Had I learned nothing from everything that came before?

Now that I had taken away their hole in the wall, they would come in through the front gate, like welcome guests.

In the coming days it became clear how much else would change as well. And how quickly. It was as if they had been waiting for such an invitation all along.

T
he next afternoon, just about two months after they first arrived here, several of Dragon Guy's men appeared at the manor house, entering the library as I was sitting there reading.

“We can fit two dozen or so here,” one of them said, surveying the room. I had never seen the man before: short, with a long continuous brow shadowing his eyes like a promontory.

I rose from my chair, and the short man's brow rippled toward me.

“Did Dragon Guy send you to talk to me?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“I'm the manager.”

The man's brow folded in on itself. “The manager of what?”

“The estate.”

He looked at me uncertainly. “I could use a cup of water,” he said.

“That's not what I do.”

“Never mind.” Turning around, he led the others back out to the corridor and on to the ballroom.

T
heir move-in was fast but orderly. They had prepared in advance who would go where, and the men transported their few belongings without difficulty. They passed me in the halls with their small bundles, most of them failing even to notice me.

In the club room and the library and the ballroom and in the rest of the other rooms on the first floor they laid out their bedrolls. The outbuildings became dormitories once again. Others settled into the suites upstairs, Madame and M. Gadds's old offices. Mine they left alone. But on the second floor their numbers were smaller, only one or two men to each room. Through the walls I heard the shifting of furniture and footsteps coming and going in the hall.

That first night, at odd hours, I awoke to officious knocking on my neighbors' doors and obsequious voices addressing “colonels” and “majors” and “captains.”

A mad scrambling up the stairs in the dark of the morning carried a “message from the general.” The message itself was muffled with the closing of a door.

Apparently, my neighbors were men of rank, Dragon Guy's lieutenants. In addition to the private rooms, they were apparently privileged with staying behind when the fighting commenced.

As had become my habit, I too spent that first night awake, listening to the sounds of the battle beyond the gate. But while my neighbors were preoccupied with whether or not they were winning, I spent the night trying to find ways to ensure they would lose. Even now, with the manor house fully invaded, my goal struck me as no less improbable than theirs.

But what, in fact, was I to do, one man against hundreds? There was no force I could bring to bear, no sort of coercion of which I could conceive. So I asked myself, what would Senator Marcus do? Or Mme Freeman, if she were here? I knew already what my father would say, that Dragon Guy and his followers had just as much right to be here as I did. But I had sworn to serve the estate, not to provide shelter and haven for anyone who might seek it. And in any case, I disagreed. They had no more right to invade my home than I did theirs, and I would not sit idly by and let it happen.

In the dawn, heavy with exhaustion but no closer to a solution, I shuffled out to the balcony to watch Dragon Guy's soldiers return, as limp and hushed as the morning before. They drifted together in small clusters, speaking quietly of—I could not guess what it was they spoke of. Judging by their mild expressions, it could have been something as banal as the weather. It occurred to me how much they resembled common laborers coming back from the field. They could have been carrying picks and hoes instead of arms, and nothing else would have been any different.

Within a couple of minutes, the soldiers had passed, their day finally over. And I was left alone with mine. At this dark stage my day seemed to offer neither beginning nor end.

I was about to go back inside—perhaps to sleep, perhaps to piece together some sort of plan—when suddenly I heard a cry. I looked up again to find more movement at the top of the drive.

The second wave of men progressed so slowly it was possible to study every bloody shirt, every bandaged head. That first morning I counted eight men, some limping, some dragged or carried. I wondered how many more had been left behind, their bodies without hope of recovery.

By the time the wounded reached the end of the drive, the others before them had disappeared, as if—in order to be able to continue—the living had to forget the dying and the dead.

But I was not so lucky. Even after they were gone, the wounded remained with me. They followed me to my wardrobe. They trailed me to the basin. They watched me in the mirror.

That day, I did not leave my rooms. Never before had they seemed so confining. If before I had felt surrounded, now I was trapped, and nowhere I looked—even as I opened the shutters and gazed upon the capital and the surrounding hills of Lyonville—did I see a way out. I thought about writing to Madame, but what was there to say? Whereas in the past I had gotten through difficult periods just by thinking about her possible return, in our current situation the notion had become so absurd that it moved me to anger. I could not bear the thought of her seeing what had happened.

I sat a long time at my desk, drawing aimless circles on the page.

It was the smell that finally roused me, sometime before nightfall, a smell so common and yet—given our circumstances—so unusual: onion and garlic frying in oil.

It was the smell of dinner.

There was no one in the hall when I peeked my head out the door, and no one on the stairway as I peered over the banister and no one in the lobby when I got to the bottom. I heard nothing coming from the library or the club room. A vast emptiness lurked behind the closed ballroom door. But as I made my way down the corridor to the south wing, I began to hear a murmur coming from within the restaurant.

From the doorway I saw that every table was full, and for a moment I imagined a dark sea of tuxedoes and gowns and Madame standing beside a table in conversation while Georges swept by with a tray of silver serving dishes. I almost expected to find a maître d' waiting to greet me.

But no one looked up when I came in. The men were hunched over their bowls, like pigs at a trough. They had not bothered with tablecloths or napkins. Everywhere I looked, cups rested in rings of water on the naked wood. They had brought in extra chairs, six men squeezing together around a table built for four. Near the verandah a man in a buttoned shirt from which the sleeves had been ripped reclined in a wing chair, a tarnished spoon balanced on one of the arms.

In the back corner, the kitchen doors shot open and a tall rolling cart emerged. At its helm limped an old woman whose green T-shirt struggled to withstand the pull of her tremendous breasts. With every one of the woman's steps, the cart jerked forward in sudden, graceless bursts, like a car in a fit of stalling. With each jerk, the enormous pot balanced on top slid closer and closer to the edge.

At a table near the entrance, the old woman came to a stop and the man seated closest to her held up his bowl. Rising to her toes, the woman managed to dunk her arm into the pot and pull out an immense ladle, inside of which something wet and lumpy quivered. She filled his bowl with a single dripping scoop, snailing a trail of greasy blots that led back to the pot.

For each of his dinner companions she did the same.

A young man at the next table called out as she went by. “You forgot me. Come on,” he whimpered as she moved on without stopping. “Just a spoonful. Give me a bean. I'll settle for a single bean.”

“If you want to eat like two men,” the old woman rasped, not bothering to look at him, “you should work like two men.”

Circles of laughter rose up from the neighboring tables like startled crows, and the young man got to his feet with a self-effacing sigh. He was a broad-shouldered boy of perhaps eighteen, strong and full of energy.

As he approached the doorway the young man fixed me with a sneer. “What are you looking at?”

“I thought you were someone else,” I said. Though they shared no similarities other than an approximate age, I had allowed myself for just a moment to believe he was Hector. Observing the malice afflicting his face, I realized what a mistake I had made.

Without warning, the boy's shoulder slammed into mine. Only the wall at my back kept me from falling.

When I looked up again, the old woman with the cart was standing in front of me. I thought at first that she had come to help.

“Well,” she said, already losing patience, “what are you waiting for?”

She gestured with the still-dripping ladle toward the chair the young man had just vacated.

There were five other men at the table, and several of them looked up with curiosity as I sat down, almost as if they recognized me and were surprised to find me here. They could tell by my suit that I was not like them, and as far as I was concerned, that was all they needed to know.

“Where's your bowl?” the woman asked, hovering gloomily above me. Globs of what I now realized was rice slid helplessly down the sides of the ladle and back into the pot, like prisoners dragged along by their chains.

I looked around at the dishes spread out in front of the other men. Dented tin and a few hollow gourds.

“My bowl?” I said, deciding I had no choice but to play along. “I must not have brought it.”

Turning away brusquely, she lowered the ladle back into the pot. It seemed I would not be eating after all. I was uncertain whether to be disappointed or relieved.

“You can use mine.”

Before I even knew who had spoken, a thin metal vessel was pressed into my hands, still warm on the outside from being held. The inside had been scraped clean.

“Go ahead.”

I looked up to thank him, meeting a dead, milky eye.

“You can use this too.” He wiped a spoon on his elbow and handed it over.

The woman looked down upon this transaction with dull disapproval. “Next time you'd better remember to bring your own.”

“I will.” I would have agreed to anything just to bring the encounter to a close.

Grudgingly she dipped the ladle back into the pot. In the bowl, the red of the beans and the white of the rice converged in a murky, gray mass.

“How are you, monsieur?” said the man to my left. The scar on his chin twitched as he chewed, as if it were doing the talking for him.

I committed to only the briefest of glances. “Well, thank you.”

A man sitting across the table greeted me with an enormous grin. He had a broad, flat face and square, yellow teeth resembling kernels of corn. “This must be a strange sight for you.”

“Pardon?”

“Not your usual clientele,” said Corn Teeth with a chuckle.

I did not care for his overly familiar tone, and I could not imagine what grounds he might have for thinking he could condescend to me. “Have we met before?”

The other men at the table glanced at each other with lowered gazes, as if surprised and embarrassed by the question. Corn Teeth leaned back in his chair. “I don't believe we've ever spoken, but—”

“I didn't think so,” I said curtly.

“I didn't mean to interrupt your meal,” he said with exaggerated deference, sharing an outraged look with one of his neighbors. With a grating shriek, he pushed out his chair. Everyone else but the dead-eyed man who had lent me his bowl did the same.

As they cursed toward the exit, flinging glances at me over their shoulders. I considered thanking them for so kindly leaving me in peace.

“Good, isn't it?” Dead Eye snuggled his head on the table, staring longingly at his bowl.

“Here,” I said, shoving it toward him. “You have it.”

He immediately perked up. “Really?”

“I've lost my appetite.”

“If you insist,” he said, wiping the spoon on his elbow.

* * *

Every night, the fighting seemed to pick up where it had left off the night before. Each morning began with the same procession of the living and the wounded. Somehow, no matter what happened, no matter how many men he lost, Dragon Guy's army never seemed to get any smaller. If anything, it grew.

Along the paths between the outbuildings, pigs and chickens roamed. There was always something underfoot. Until now, I had not realized how many children had accompanied their parents here. The grounds began to feel less like an army encampment than like a small city. One day I discovered a group of children chasing each other through the yard beside the casino. There were twenty or so boys and girls, in ages ranging from about six to twelve, all of them perfectly oblivious to what was going on around them. That was their privilege, as children, but I could not conceive of how Dragon Guy could be so reckless as to assemble a playground in the middle of a battlefield.