The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (14 page)

But was it enough? As he watched the ketch’s brilliant white sails strain forward
and fill his vision, Dolan thought no, it was not enough, yet as he prepared himself
for the inevitable impact, it was just enough. The two boats, crisscrossing, slid
past each other with no room to spare, the
Payday
’s bowsprit scoring a jagged line through the paint of the ketch’s transom, the two
captains hurling insults at each other, Renee full of contempt for her rival, a coward
and cheater.
You fucking pussy,
she hollered across the widening gap between the boats. Parmentier threw his martini
glass and it shattered at the feet of the ketch’s skipper. Then the drama was over,
the sailboats bucking away from one another into the sparkling dance of light across
the bay.

Real cute, said Dolan, glaring at Renee. He understood he had made a mistake, agreeing
to anything outside the boundaries he had established over the years with Parmentier,
but against his better judgment he was fascinated by the girl.

You don’t approve of the way I sail? she asked, and even her sunglasses couldn’t mask
her amusement at his displeasure.

I don’t approve of losing, he said. If you do whatever it takes to win, you better
fucking win.

Whatever was driving the aggression of her mood that morning broke with laughter and
the fight lifted from her shoulders and she told Dolan she couldn’t agree with him
more. Next time, she said, you’re going to want to bet on me.

Parmentier wanted advice and the two men left Renee at the helm and went below to
sit at the small fold-down table in the galley and talk. This Haiti thing, said Parmentier,
you know about it? I don’t know about any Haiti thing, said Dolan. What Haiti thing
are you talking about? Two things, really, said Parmentier. His people had asked him
to go down there and analyze the business climate, opportunities created by the political
situation, find out who was quietly advertising for partners, who needed to be capitalized.
After the American military pulled out, Haiti was an attractive prospect for Parmentier’s
associates, all action, no risk, because who’s going to fuck with you, and everybody,
I mean top to bottom, crying to jump in your pocket for pennies on the dollar. So,
said Parmentier, I help my people get going down there.

And that would be doing what? said Dolan. Fixing the sewers?

Well, you know, Connie. Business. Finance. Trade. Men making the world go ’round.
So my thing’s up and running and it’s sweet. I’m not making enemies, I’m making friends.
We’re shipping high-quality product in and out with zero interference and the team
is happy and then one of your guys finds me and he wants to step on me, but guess
what, he doesn’t want to shut me down, he wants to add on, he wants to expand the
action, bump the value, join the party.

Hold up, said Dolan. What guy are we talking about here?

One of your guys from Miami. He knew all about me, all about you. Fed named Rice,
Reece. One of yours.

Dolan grunted ambiguously with no intention of telling Parmentier he had never heard
of an agent from the Miami bureau named Rice or Reece, and Dolan was certain no one
would ever think of looping Parmentier into another federal operation—offshore, no
less—without consulting him first.

Okay, said Parmentier, so maybe I’m a misty-eyed idealist, but I wasn’t expecting
this, Connie. My understanding was, the day you closed the Tampa shop was the day
I walked back into my own thing, no strings attached, no recalls; shred the files
and burn the house down and keep your buddies off my ass because I have served my
country and I’m a motherfucking patriot. I’m not saying I make the world a better
place, but we balanced the books, right? We zeroed out.

Dolan said, What’s Reece asking you to do?

Nothing I can’t do but that’s not the point. If the Feds can gin up an illegal casino
in Tampa, I guess they can do whatever the fuck they want, right?

Dolan said, What are you asking
me
to do?

Fuck, Connie, I don’t know. Tell me I don’t have to do this.

You don’t have to do this.

What I wanted to hear.

But if you were smart, Dolan said, you’d think about it. You know what I’m saying.

I know what you’re saying.

One more thing, said Dolan, and he nodded his head aft, Renee above them at the wheel
framed from the waist up by the open hatch.

She’s straight, man, said Parmentier. She’ll blow a line of coke every once in a while
but that’s it. Beginning, middle, end of story.

Tell me a girl that smart doesn’t have your number.

I’m a businessman, I do some work for the government here and there—what’s to know?
She knows I make a lot of money and when she asks a question I tell her something
and she doesn’t ask again. She does her thing, I do mine. And hey, bro, she loves
me.

Why?

Don’t go hurting my feelings, Connie.

Conrad Dolan spent the following week on the phone, trying to pin down the operation
but could only establish that agent Reece’s bona fides were in order, that the operation
wasn’t Miami-based but had originated up the food chain in Washington, and that the
field officer assigned to Parmentier in Port-au-Prince was none other than an erstwhile
colleague, Woodrow Singer, in Dolan’s opinion the embodiment of a worthless breed
of special agent infesting the ranks throughout the decade like termites chewing into
the Bureau’s wood—midwestern evangelicals and razor-cut Mormons and born-again millenarians
dedicated to spreading the word of Christ from behind their desks, more inclined to
ask a source to pray with them than pass on information important to a case. In the
convolutions of their moral universe, hell on earth was being ordered by a supervisor
to stake out a brothel, consume an alcoholic beverage with satanic rock and roll pounding
in their ears, look at tits, and talk to a bad guy who had no regard for Jesus. The
Prissies, Dolan called them, this new half-breed of hygienic agents. In Dolan’s experience,
too much religion, like too much bureaucracy, watered down a nation’s ability to remain
strong; he could feel it happening in the Bureau, he could feel it happening in America,
and when he learned that Woodrow Singer had been assigned to Parmentier to develop
an operation in Haiti, the nature of which no one in Dolan’s network of contacts seemed
to know, his heart sank because he understood Singer would never be able to exert
control over a con man like Parmentier, that, sensing Woodrow Singer’s weakness, eventually
Parmentier would work the setup to his own advantage, a prospect that unsettled Dolan
because the benefits and immunities accorded Parmentier for his participation in the
Tampa sting were already beyond the pale.

Soon after that day on the sailboat Parmentier and his wife disappeared south, back
to Haiti, Dolan had his own business to attend to in Latin America and it was another
month before they were all back in Florida and Parmentier finally answered his cell
phone and Dolan said,
Como sa va,
fuckhead, and Parmentier said the reception on his phone was lousy and how did tomorrow
morning at nine sound. Dolan said fine, bring a gun to shoot yourself with.

They met, as was their habit, on the boat. Dolan said let’s ring some bells and then
said the name of Woodrow Singer. He wanted to know why Parmentier had solicited his
advice on a decision that had already been made, an operation that was already up
and running and assigned a handler. Parmentier swore he hadn’t been misleading Dolan
when he asked for advice, although he admitted he hadn’t explained himself well or
completely. He had only spoken to Reece in Miami and had only promised Reece he would
think about it, take the project under consideration, then, on his next trip to Haiti,
there was Woodrow Singer—the Deacon, Renee called him, God this and the Bible that,
Haiti is Beezlebub’s workshop, you too are a sinner boy and I can help you come back
to Jesus—and Parmentier knew he had to close the door on this jackass but, Connie,
said Parmentier, things got complicated like they always do. I got word from one of
my associates that the big dogs wanted me inside the operation.

One of your guys? asked Dolan, astounded. How come you’re not dead yet, letting it
be known you work with the Feds? You’re out of your everfucking mind, my friend.

Hey, no, it’s cool, Connie, I’m covered, said Parmentier. He said he had a board of
directors, and one of them took him aside and said in confidence he had someone on
the payroll inside the Miami bureau and this guy told him about the Haiti project
the Feds were starting up and mentioned Parmentier’s name and the big dog fell in
love with the project and thought it would fit in well with some other things they
were wanting to do and he said, hey, just between you and me, let’s do it. So I’ve
been doing it but honest to God, Connie, this guy Singer is like a god-robot, he doesn’t
understand how to work with a businessman, he’s got no sense of humor, he thinks all
Haitians are maggots—which, you know, causes its own set of problems—and I wasn’t
shitting you when I asked back then if I had to do this.

Let me assure you, said Dolan, your organization has no one on its payroll inside
the Miami bureau.

Don’t be too sure about that, Connie.

Your associate found out about this project from some other source.

Whatever, said Parmentier. Water under the bridge, all right?

Dolan thought he had heard Parmentier say he was withdrawing from his role in the
operation but that wasn’t the case. Parmentier’s enthusiasm for the project had only
grown, as had his belief that Singer, however irritating, would become less of a problem
over time.

What’s so great about this project anyway, said Dolan. What are we talking about here?

It’s one of those things, said Parmentier. I can’t say. This has been made very clear
to me.

What? That you can’t tell me? They said my name?

No, that I can’t tell anybody. Even, like, my wife, although she knows some of the
pieces because she’s useful, right. There’s only four guys in the loop. Actually five.
Me, the dog, Reece, Singer, a local guy in Port-au-Prince.

Make it six, said Dolan.

Aw, Connie, come on, you know how this stuff works.

You bet I do, you little prick, said Dolan, his voice spilling out the wrath. Whatever
you’re doing, when it goes wrong, I better not see any blowback headed in my direction.
Anybody comes after you, you ask that motherfucking Holy Roller Woodrow Singer to
take care of it.

Aw, Connie, come on, don’t be that way. It’s just a little backroom paperwork. Passports,
visas. You know what I’m saying.

Dolan, though, hadn’t expected this, the government slipping clients across the border
with forged documents. Who are they bringing in? he asked.

I don’t know, said Parmentier. Some guys they said who helped them in the Gulf War
and other places who couldn’t stay where they were and when they tried to come here
I guess got fucked by the system. Sand niggers, towel heads. You know the kind of
people I’m talking about.

Helped who? asked Dolan, mystified. I’m trying to understand this. Are we friends
with these people anymore?

They don’t sketch it out for me, Connie. I just assumed the military. Like those mountain
people helped our guys in Vietnam against the communists. We put them in Kansas or
Minnesota or some shit hole, right?

I don’t get it, said Dolan.

Sure you do, Connie, said Parmentier. It’s like me and you, right? You make me a promise
and you keep your promise. Hey, when the trooper pulled me over on the turnpike, right?
He didn’t know he was wasting his time? Same thing, right? This guy over there makes
you a promise, this guy over here doesn’t know or care about the promise, the guy
who made the promise has to fix the problem. It’s his duty, right?

That was the last Dolan saw or heard from Parmentier until he phoned from the Miami
courthouse where he was being arraigned for murder. But he ran into Renee one more
time.

By now Tom Harrington had felt his anger devolve to a familiar lethargy—the same sense
that he disappeared into during every narrative told to him in Haiti, like a theatergoer
dragged onstage and swallowed into the ensemble, and he broke his silence with the
well-rehearsed lines of his frustration, the refrain that he couldn’t make go away.

Are you a good guy or a bad guy? he asked Dolan.

All Dolan said was that he thought lawyers weren’t supposed to ask questions to which
they didn’t want to know the answers. Harrington’s rage seemed to jerk him up by the
collar of his shirt and send him out of the bar and up the Oloffson’s creaky wooden
staircase to his shabby dormitory room in a wing of the hotel that had once been a
hospital ward earlier in the century. In the stifling darkness of the room a scythe
of panic cut him at the knees and he tumbled into the lumpy heat of his bed, choking
back sobs of self-pity. He had seen all the dead but had never seen the dying. There
was a dog once, his dog, when he was fourteen years old. Rubbernecking accidents on
Interstate 95. Breathing fast and hard he made himself light-headed, staring blindly
at the slow rotation of the ceiling fan. Sometime in the middle of the night gunfire
erupted down the hill toward the palace, the echo of the unseen violence carrying
him safely past the dread and grief and torment to a terrible calm.

What Dolan said. He had killed a man, hadn’t he?

Maybe. Probably. Yes, most likely he had. Add it to the list. Most likely he was damned,
a condition remarkable only for the lack of difficulty or regret with which he accepted
it before he fell asleep.

CHAPTER TEN

In the serving line the three soldiers heaped their plates with stewed beef and grilled
fish and varieties of salad but barely touched the food back at the table, their appetites
lost or perhaps they just didn’t trust the cooking or had become so accustomed to
eating pouches of ready-made rations they were unable to stomach anything better.
Tom saw the melancholic weight of this, their final night in Haiti, upon them, their
shoulders hunched forward and spirits sagging and Jackie cocked her head to show concern
and asked what was going on, guys, why so gloomy? They were going home and leaving
the job hanging in the air and there were no follow-ons and no Plan Bs and no satisfaction
and they were without glory. The arc of their narrative in Haiti had begun with the
roads lined ten deep with teary-eyed wretches screaming
thank you
and had climaxed with the curtain closing on a loud chorus of
fuck you
s, a coda of resentment. They were going home to pick up the pieces of their lives
or going home to an empty house or irate wives and children they hardly knew and after
forty-five days they would ship out to Bosnia or Chad or Colombia or some other land
of the eternally cursed and forsaken where everyone was at each other’s throats and
you had every reason to expect your neighbors were coming after you during the night.

Eville Burnette apologized to Tom and Jackie. We’re here but we’re not here.

We’re gone but we’re not gone, Tet Rouge agreed, a weak smile in the corner of his
mouth.

Inside the hotel’s lobby the house band began to tune their instruments and Warrant
Officer Brooks looked at his wristwatch and pushed back his chair and said, No, we’re
just gone, but Eville Burnette said if it was all right with them and all right with
Tom and Jackie, he would stay and listen to the music for a while and get a taxi back
to the LIC or maybe Tom would give him a ride. The soldiers had a two-man rule and
Tom could see that the warrant officer did not like this idea of splitting up and
was surprised when he heard the officers defer to the noncom and Brooks say, Plane’s
at oh-six-hundred. See you there. They stood up together like boys accused of trespassing,
Brooks and Captain Butler, fixed the berets on their heads and said sorry for being
bad company and left.

Burnette and Jackie let Tom buy a round of rum sours and when Joseph returned with
the drinks the waiter told Tom there was a man who had asked to see him and then the
voodoo drummers sent a thunderclap of rhythm into the night. Jackie looked at him
knowingly, her eyes suggesting their common secret, and the drums were like a call
to arms to Harrington’s obsession.

In the story Tom told his wife, Jacqueline Scott had been displaced from his lap to
sit properly at his side, a realignment necessary to create an official version of
the story. Because what was he going to say otherwise, even though for Harrington
the truest part of what happened in the
houngan
’s private chapel, the part that would always cause him to lie, was Jackie there atop
him, pressing herself into Tom’s lap every day for the rest of his life, his mind
sown with the indelible desire that seemed to invade him so suddenly when the space
between the two of them widened, as if these small distances—she below him on the
beach or crossing a room toward him or Tom watching her now above him in the veranda’s
aquarium of happy light, drinking with Master Sergeant Eville Burnette—were somehow
aphrodisiacal, the atmosphere between them swirling with the fumes of attraction that
seemed easy to ignore only if he were at her side, close enough to measure her afflictions,
reacting to the imperfect details of a person and not a white-hot, fever-dream blaze
of yearning.

Sitting poolside on the lower terrace with François Colon, the Haitian lawyer who
had left messages throughout the day and had now begged Harrington away from his dinner
guests for a few minutes, Tom couldn’t take his eyes from her. He decided he didn’t
like it very much when Jackie leaned in to Burnette to confide her thoughts, or touched
his arm when she laughed, and Colon, increasingly perturbed, received only the residue
of Tom’s attention.

But then François Colon ended a sentence Tom did not quite hear with a phrase that
jarred him. The spell snapped and he made himself focus on the light-skinned lawyer,
the last scion of a family annihilated by the dictator Papa Doc while Colon was away
at university in Paris. He was an elegant, green-eyed mulatto with the fluffy manners
of a Creole aristocrat who had made a fortune protecting other people’s fortunes from
the internecine cupidity of the ruling class, and Harrington did not care for his
smug superiority or his list of clients.

Sorry, he said. What was that?

I said, Don’t you?

Don’t I what?

Believe in mass graves for the right people.

You don’t know what you’re saying, François, Tom responded, and by the time Colon
explained his point, Harrington found himself buried under the edifice of the principles
that had defined him, first as a correspondent and now as a lawyer and activist, not
vague notions but once-clear ideas battered into merciless diffusion by Haiti.

He had come to understand that we choose the lies in which we participate and, in
choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time, perhaps forever—Haiti
invited such participation, Haiti was a feeding trough for the manifest appetites
of egos and illusions and simple schemes of rescue, Haiti offered its players a culture
of impunity not just for the atrocities that devoured body and soul, but for the self-deceptions
best described as crimes of enlightenment. Tom Harrington understood this, understood
that the notions of civilization he had devoted himself to were mostly myths meant
to replenish one’s inventory of motivations, and if power could be used for moral
purposes, he had seen very little of it in the world. Justice was the blood sport
of kings, human rights were the toilet that powerful men shit in. Am I wrong or right?
demanded François Colon. The rights of man—was that the benediction he recited as
he stood over the freshly opened pits, counting the bones?

Somewhere along the line, standing over the graves watching the bones boil up to the
surface, Harrington had lost a firm sense of the value of life and, knowing that was
the case, fought for its value with more ferocity but less inner faith in the battle
and in himself, a humanitarian wandering around hell in a stupor. Now it seemed he
would be tested again.

For some months the bourgeoisie in the north, the big landowners in the mountains
west of Cap-Haïtien, had begun to return quietly from exile in Miami and New York
and the Dominican Republic to live in the democracy created by the Americans. Colon
himself had encouraged them, assured them—your fields are fallow, your coffee beans
unpicked, your workers unpaid, your prayers unanswered: be patriots, rebuild your
homeland, restore its dignity and beauty. Yes, there were troubles between the families
and the peasants in the past; yes, there was oppression; yes, there was exploitation;
yes, bloodshed; but Haitians were one people sharing one destiny and would, perforce,
accept the new order. And, monsieur, how do you suppose it has been for them since
they have returned to their country? asked Colon. What in their birthplace did they
find to lift their spirits?
Merde.
Shit. Instead of democracy, anarchy. Instead of police, bandits. Instead of new friends,
old enemies. Instead of harmony, revenge. Instead of human beings, animals. Instead
of peace, death.

Fran
ç
ois Colon asked Tom to remember back to the second week of the invasion when American
marines had occupied Cap-Haïtien. You know, of course, of the massacre by Jacques
Lecoeur and his men in the countryside during that time, said Colon. The houses of
the
chefs du sections
razed to the ground, the men and their families nowhere to be found, two FAHD caserns
attacked and overrun by Lecoeur’s gang, the soldiers unaccounted for.

You investigated these massacres yourself, monsieur, I recall.

I heard the rumors, yes.

Rumors!

You’re right, I did investigate. No bodies, no graves, no witnesses. And yes, the
chefs du section
’s houses were burned, but these men were
macoutes
—

Ah, monsieur, I’m happy you make this point, because it answers my original question:
You believe in mass graves for the right people
. . .
the so-called bad people, yes?

That’s not at all what I’m saying, Harrington protested. I mean they were men hated
by their communities, by the people, and they abandoned their houses and abandoned
their posts and ran away.

Perhaps we must think of it as justice, when bad people are killed by vigilantes,
said Colon, offending Harrington, because advocates like François Colon, men of his
position, men with no apparent use for the inconveniences of process and transparency,
were the ones who had maneuvered adamantly behind the scenes to thwart the Commission
for Truth and Reconciliation.

Yes, I admit as much, said Colon, but now I am here to help.

But it’s over, Harrington wanted to say. Talk to me about it, he said instead.

On a page he removed from a yellow legal pad, Colon gave Harrington the names and
last known location of six men and one woman—all members of families notorious for
plundering Haiti generation after
generation—and Tom read the names and stared at the piece of paper. Where are these
people? asked Colon. He wanted Tom to find them. You know how to do this, he said.
Arrangements had been made. Find their bodies or find their killers, he said, and
doors that are closed shall open.

But it’s over, Harrington again wanted to say but knew he couldn’t, and his vacant
gaze drifted up to the veranda and settled on Jackie, the gabled and spired backdrop
of the hotel like a haunted house in the moonlight, and the longer he looked at her
the more he felt a stranger to himself, sensing she would stalk the periphery of his
life if he did not know her.

His return to the table interrupted a debate about the wisdom of disbanding the collection
of brutes and idiots formerly known as the Haitian army, Jackie wagging her fork at
Eville to make a point Tom imagined she had picked up from the newspapers. The conversation
stopped, the two of them studying the change in Tom as he sat back down. There’s a
situation, he said, his brow furrowing. Something’s come up. It wasn’t his nature
to be evasive and his reluctance to explain himself, acting as though he had something
to hide, made him uncomfortable. He looked at Jackie, her eyes quizzical, her expression
waiting for him to speak, and could not resist the impulse to tell her everything.
Neither she nor Burnette seemed to understand or care about the moral ambiguity of
his mission to the north.

What’s this Lecoeur like? Burnette wondered, impressed that Tom had hiked into the
mountains and tracked down the guerilla leader, a goal that had eluded the Special
Forces.

I doubt very much that he’s a killer.

He’s a warlord.

Bad intel, said Tom. He’s a freedom fighter.

How can you be a so-called freedom fighter and not a killer? said Master Sergeant
Burnette. Explain that one to me.

Can I go with you? Jackie said to Tom and though he hesitated and said he wanted to
think about it and Eville thought it was a bad idea to take her up into the wild heart
of the mountains, again it was not possible for Tom to tell her no.

Eville said thanks for the night out and wished them luck and Tom walked him down
to the car park and there was Gerard still hanging about with his crowd of fixers,
playing dominoes. He gave Gerard the keys to drive the sergeant back to his base and
told him he could take the car home for the night but be back early to go to the airport.
Gerard asked if he was leaving for Miami and Tom said, no, Le Cap. Gerard wanted to
know if he should pack an overnight bag but Tom told him he was flying up with the
UN and Gerard knew what that meant, no Haitians except
gros negs
and murderers. If you’re ever in Fayettenam, said Eville Burnette. They shook hands
and Tom felt they had both come a long way in the past year toward respecting each
other’s place in the world but doubted they would ever see one another again.

Jackie had left the veranda—Tom could see that as he walked back toward the wall of
sound coming from the Oloffson, the air fragrant with potential, anxious to be alone
with her again. Maybe someone had asked her to dance he thought and pushed his way
into the bar and searched the cramp of dancers out on the floor but there were only
two white women there among the heave of black bodies and she wasn’t one of them.
He waited by the line to the WC until a man came out and then he went to the front
desk and asked to be connected on the house phone to her room but the line was busy
and still busy when he tried again after squeezing back through to the bar for a cognac,
then back again for another as the band unplugged and the place began to empty down
to Tom and the bartender and a lost pair of unlucky whores, one with four or five
strands of billy-goat hair on her chin. He phoned one last time and she picked up
with a sharp,
Yes?
He said, You just disappeared, and Jackie said in a bothered tone
that it really been a long day
and she’d see him in the morning. When he went back to the bar to sign his bill he
heard pistol shots outside the high walls but that was normal and he went to bed.

Of all the things he might have said to her he said the worst, telling her she looked
pretty as she thumped across the floorboards of the veranda toward him the next morning
shortly after dawn. Her face was open and fresh and painfully young, without makeup
except the slightest bit to enlarge her eyes. What she could pull back of her hair
was banded in a ponytail, what she couldn’t pull back hung to the sides like a dog’s
floppy ears, a black baseball cap on her head sans logo or lettering, her tan photographer’s
vest over a white V-neck T-shirt, the same baggy many-pocketed pants he had seen her
in before, hiking boots, camera bag, the straps of a nylon day pack pushing her breasts
together into a pronounced greeting. Her sleepy expression hardened as she lowered
her bag and removed her pack and sat across from Tom at the table bringing a whiff
of talcum and skin lotion to his nose. She looked right through him and he could see
she was this other woman again, severe and bilious and bitchy, the one he knew first
and still most expected.