The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (66 page)

Ev, I came in here tonight to say I love you and to give you my daddy’s pistol but
I wanted to talk about the future too, if you’ll allow that, and I’ll start by telling
you my health is fine, so that’s not the issue, understood? But I’ve been thinking
a lot about the ranch, she continued. Maybe I should sell it, maybe to Mr. Joe and
Deolinda or maybe to another true soul who’ll work it but not to Wayne or his crowd,
who’d break it up into ranchettes to make an easy fortune off the shitbirds. And you
saw for yourself, Ross is out of the question. He’d trade the whole spread for a month’s
worth of getting high. What if one of my fool horses throws me someday and I break
my damn fool neck? Then the three of you would have to work it out, and I don’t like
to picture that one bit. You want to say something?

No, Mom, he said, although he was thinking that it had never crossed his mind that
he was the good son, and that his brothers were not, for whatever reason. He was the
absent one, they were nearby, on call, should they be needed. No, he said, you just
say what you want to say.

Well then, I’ll ask you, she said. How much time do you have left? In the army?

I’m committed to three more years. After that, I can’t say.

Do you imagine you’d ever want to return? Here, I mean. To the ranch.

Just like Dawson, he said. I would.

You don’t want to ponder on it some more?

Nope.

Your brothers will get some money. One doesn’t need it, the other needs to burn through
it.

Whatever you want. It’s your place. It’s your money.

We understand each other?

We always have.

Merry Christmas, Ev.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s advanced at the same luxurious pace as his
first week home, the bracing freedoms indulged in moderation by the fine laziness
of books, coffee talks at the breakfast table, helping his mother tend her stable
of Appaloosas or riding snowmobiles with Joaquin to drop feed for the herd, solitary
walks toward the Camas or up into Ponderosas and Lodgepole pines along the ridges,
Ev and his mother on no particular schedule one afternoon when they joined in a sentimental
pawing through Dawson’s desk, searching for the man in his papers and scrapbooks,
then candlelit dinners at the oak table, the warmth and pine-glow of sheltering against
the elements, sensible talk about their country and about their world and outrageous
gossip ripped with fits of laughter, and they talked about the future too, both resigned
and hopeful, on the cusp again of separation. On New Year’s Eve the grand dames spent
the twilight hours holed up in their respective bathrooms—boudoirs, said his mother—preparing
themselves for the big night out, a shindig at the American Legion hall, dinner and
a dance and midnight champagne and noisemakers in the company of Missoula’s finest,
lifelong friends and lifelong adversaries, both factions the real people, in his mother’s
opinion, the homegrown permanent insiders indispensable to a place’s identity and
memory and sense of trueness.

You couldn’t find anyone inside the legion’s steaming banquet hall who wasn’t wearing
a cowboy hat and boots, Ev’s a Christmas present, made from the skin of a rattlesnake
disposed of by Joaquin’s shotgun. You couldn’t find a female in the herd who wasn’t
decked out like a Queen of the West. Every surviving member of Dawson’s old posse
of smoke jumpers and veterans made it his duty to stand Paige and Eville a drink,
Joaquin and Deolinda feted nearby with the same wet enthusiasm by Joaquin’s Korean
war legionnaires, which meant they were all mutually tipsy by the time the waitresses
brought the steaks and fixings to the tables. With everyone tucked into their meals,
a country and western band set up on the small stage at the far end of the hall, the
group fronted by a female vocalist who, by ten o’clock, began belting out her repertory
of Patsy Cline. At some point his mother grabbed his hand and hauled him out of his
seat.

Dance with me, Scout. I need to smell you before you go away.

Then the music stopped and the singer’s voice boomed from the microphone,
Yippee yay, you all, it’s 1997.
Paige kissed him and looked balefully into his eyes and whispered,
Back to soldiering
,
soldier boy,
and lowered her forehead against him, tapping his rib cage with the crown of her skull,
almost like she was asking to be let in. The band played “Auld Lang Syne”
and he was slow to recognize his mother’s surreptitious jag of sobbing until he felt
the wetness of her tears spotting his chest. I don’t know what’s wrong with me anymore,
she squeaked, childlike, between muffled gasps. I can’t seem to hold my liquor.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Tampa, Florida

Sarajevo, Bosnia

Cairo, Egypt

Fort Bragg, North Carolina

Nairobi, Kenya

Kirkuk, Iraq

Uzbekistan

Panjshir Valley, Afghanistan

Mojave Desert, California

Augusta, Georgia, April 1998

His orders, when he arrived back at Fort Bragg, were to pack his full kit and proceed
with due haste to Tampa and report to CENTCOM for a weeklong series of briefings and
further instructions before catching a commercial flight to Bosnia. He would be traveling
under his real name as a civilian defense contractor employed by an Agency shell company
known as Omega Systems. He would also carry two passports, blue and brown, the blue
one ready to hand over in an emergency so he would not end up facedown on the tarmac
with his head blown off by a hijacker. A level below the cover was his official mission,
documented and classified, to assist NATO operations in the capture of war criminals.
Ride the elevator down to the deepest level of the operational shaft and the mission
went entirely black.

At MacDill Air Force Base, inside the offices of SOCCENT, Burnette was introduced
to a major and his working group tasked with compiling a jihadi database, an intelligence
mother-net of personalities, finances, and logistics that could be cross-referenced
and matrixed with other servers and inputs. Burnette was provided with a Sony still
camera that could burst digital pictures into the system by satellite, then given
a block of instruction on how to access the biometric database resident on servers
in Tampa. They sat him down in front of a screen for a day to familiarize himself
with the list of high-value targets that might be out there with their camels and
scimitars wreaking havoc in the Balkans. He was made to memorize the top-five high-value
capture/kill targets, names and faces, and download to his computer another longer
catch-and-release list of suspects whose activities had yet to come into focus. He
watched films captured from AQ operatives and Chechens, recording the torture and
murder of prisoners of war in Bosnia and Chechnya, scenarios and images of unadulterated
horror twisting in his intestines that prompted him to recall the SERE class back
at Bragg, the Kennedy School instructors warming up the trainees to the possibility
of being beheaded on international television.

During his last intensive morning with the task force, something happened that he
knew to expect but it had never happened before—his twenty-four-hour pager went off,
buzzing like a June bug on his belt. Hey, that’s a first, he said sheepishly to the
guys in the room, who seemed to be waiting for him to dash to the bathroom and reemerge
as some comic book superhero. Burnette excused himself off to the side and stared
at the pager, which flashed with the number of his own cell phone, which he retrieved
from his briefcase and activated and up popped the novelty of a message in text.
Your attendance requested. Tonight, 1945 hrs,
and then a street address in Ybor City, and the sign off,
Arnie.

Can Chambers hack my pager? Burnette asked himself, feeling naive.

The SOCCENT guys called in pizza for lunch and he worked straight through with the
group until the end of the day, when the major shook his hand and said, That’s it,
Sergeant Burnette. You are now switched on, and gave him a mini-dictionary in Serbo-Croat
as a going-away present. At 7:15 he took a cab up along Hillsborough Bay through downtown
Tampa and over to the historic, gentrified neighborhood of Ybor City, where the driver
let him off at the bottom of Seventh Avenue, the nightclub and entertainment district
closed to traffic. He joined the happy flow of Friday night, the prosperous mob heading
to the bars and restaurants, tracking the numbers on the buildings until he found
an old brick cigar factory, restored to house a cooperative of artist studios and
galleries. Okay, Burnette said to himself, stepping through the main entrance, now
what? The answer was announced by a placard displayed on an easel outside the plate
glass front of a well-lit gallery.

Meet The Artist

Voodoo Spirits: The Houngan Priests of Haiti

Photographs by Renee Gardner

Exhibit Opening: Tonight, 8, wine and cheese

He peered through the window at the row of black-and-white photos mounted on the wall,
waist-up and head shots boldly enlarged to life-sized scale, darkly luminous portraits
of Haitians at some stage of ecstatic derangement, and he looked at the three people
visible inside the gallery, two women and a man setting up a refreshment table, fussing
over snack trays and uncorking bottles, and he looked at his wristwatch—1950, five
minutes late or ten minutes early—and tried the door but it was locked. The people
inside looked his way and one of the women smiled and came to let him in and he could
hear the gunshots of her stiletto heels striking the polished wood flooring and he
thought whoever she was—in that little black dress, its décolletage cut to showcase
volcanic breasts, the dangle of diamond earrings matched by the toothy sparkle of
her lipstick smile, the pixie-cut auburn hair à la Audrey Hepburn, her beauty earthbound
but her glamour stratospheric—she could not possibly be the photographer, the so-called
artist. Owner, patron, celebrity screw-on hood ornament—anybody but somebody who
crawled in the dirt of the peristyle with the
lwas.

As she approached the door she held out an arm, enticing him with a set of keys. He
noticed her bracelet of eyes, the three rows of dark blue beads, but the glass cuff
didn’t register in a memory that rarely cataloged or valued jewelry. She inserted
the key into the lock. The door opened inward and she held it, posing. He stared at
her and he stared at her, straining to see what he wasn’t seeing but sensed he should,
and she returned his stare with an audacious lack of guile. Then she stepped forward
in an envelope of knee-weakening fragrance and kissed him on the cheek.

Hello, Eville. Thanks for coming.

He sputtered something inarticulate, and she winked and said, Come on, come in.

He stared even harder.

She raised a plucked eyebrow and said, Maybe it’s the boob job?

Dottie? Dottie Chambers?

Renee Gardner, she drawled, holding out her hand. A pleasure, she said, and offered
to guide him through a quick private tour of her work before the public arrived.

On Saturday’s transatlantic flight he tried to read one of the books his mother had
given him for Christmas, a collection of Twain’s writing from
Innocents Abroad,
and he put on his headset and tried to watch the movie being shown, and he tried memorizing
some sentences in Serbo-Croatian, and he tried sleeping, but whatever he tried to
do to pass the time in a peaceful and ordinary manner, there was Dottie galloping
into his thoughts. He couldn’t get far past the truth that this version of Dottie—her
metamorphosis into Renee Gardner—had reeled him in. In less than fifteen minutes.
By the time he left the gallery he was enchanted and, much, much worse, he was jealous,
both fairly reliable signs that she had invented effective new ways to drive him crazy.
He had stood in front of her photographs in awe.

Did you really take these pictures? he had to ask, and she spoke to him in a lowered
voice from that moment on, establishing the confidentiality that made room for her
to play her repertoire of personas simultaneously, until the gallery filled with people
and she was Renee, completed, invincible, and perfect.

Tell me the truth, she said, and he noticed her eyes were a bit too incandescent and
her voice became sweetly southern but manic the longer she talked. What was your opinion
of me?

Unformed, he said, and she laughed at the lie.

You thought I was just fucking around. The camera was a prop, right. Like I was in
my own little action movie or my own little spy novel, entertaining myself, pretending
to be a photographer. There are one hundred photojournalists covering the story, the
war, the invasion, whatever, and only one who’s not real, and that was me—except I
was
real.

Hey, he said, leaning to speak in her ear, are you high?

Yes! she said with gleeful disregard. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

They shifted their position to the next photograph and he asked her why he was here
and her expression fielded the question like a small wound and she said because you’re
my partner. Then she told him her secret, parts of it, and he asked, Why are you telling
me this?

Well, who else can I tell? she said. I knew you were in town and I know you’re leaving
tomorrow and I wanted you to come to my opening, I really did. But listen, Ev, I’m
serious now. This isn’t Daddy talking.

Who’s talking? he asked tersely.

I know you hated Jackie Scott. And I hope you never get to know poor little cokehead
scag Renee Gardner. This is Dottie talking. I need to know you’ll come rescue me if
something goes wrong.

When are you going back down? he asked.

I don’t know. Soon, I hope. It depends if I’m lucky in love, she said, her eyes darting
toward the door, unlocked and opened and the gallery owner greeting people. Renee
took Ev’s hand and it seemed she had no intention of ever releasing it as she drew
him ahead into the space of the next portrait. Remember this lovely old man? she asked.

Eville studied the portrait, the background darkness of the world and the darkness
of human flesh, both incipient and corpselike and natural and animated, interrupted
by the diabolic and overpowering radiance of the subject’s eyes.

The guy from Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, said Eville.

Right, she said. The
empereur
. Isn’t he beautiful? He died four days after I took this photograph. Nothing nefarious,
he was just old and sick. There’s a new
empereur
now up there, Honore Vincent, and I’m afraid he doesn’t think very well of me. And
by the way, you’ve heard about the interim commander of the police, Major Dupuys?
He was recalled to Port-au-Prince.

I didn’t realize he was interim.

There’s a new chief. You haven’t heard? It’s Ti Phillipe.

They moved to the next photograph and he made the observation that although she did
not seem inclined to let go of his hand, he would not run away if she did, and she
said, You’re not surprised?

About Phillipe? he said. No, in a country where nothing makes sense, what makes the
most sense is being an opportunist. When did you say you were going back?

Soon. Back and forth.

Do you think you’ll be going up to Le Cap? he asked. I need you to check on somebody
for me. Her name’s Margarete. Margarete Estime.

Definitely, she said. Done.

There were perhaps two dozen people in the gallery now and even as they talked she
could not keep herself from watching the door and then he saw by the way her eyes
jumped back to hide with his, underscored by an excited if unconscious lock on his
hand, that whoever she was expecting was there and she preempted his natural curiosity
as he began to pivot.

Don’t look, she said. Wait a minute.

Who is it?

There were two guys, she said, easy to spot, sunglasses and gold chains and Hawaiian
shirts and linen pants, not the type of guys you’d think would come to gallery openings.
One was a nickel-and-dime dealer to the college student/office worker crowd, who imagined
himself as her boyfriend. Jackie Scott had seen the other man around in Haiti but
never met him. He was a supplier, with influential friends, who was increasingly powerful
himself. The dealer liked to talk to her about his friend who spent a lot of time
in Haiti and she had gambled on the validity of the connection to send an innocent
message. Bring him along, I’d like to meet him. Jesus, thought Eville, I should have
known. Narco-traffickers, Haiti—wasn’t this Sandy Coleman’s case?

I explained this to you in Cap-Haïtien, she said. It’s not about drugs. The drugs
are something you keep staring at until you see what it’s really about.

Where’s this heading?

A honeymoon in Haiti would be nice.

She raised her left hand, her fingers fluttering an acknowledgment, and whispered,
Here they come, and she threw her arms around him and kissed Ev hungrily and he closed
his eyes and kissed her back. Then her lips were at his ear and she was saying thanks
and she was saying, Go.

He opened his eyes and stepped away from her with his blood racing and said, I’m sold.
How much is it again?

Which one? Renee said. She cocked her head coquettishly and looked at him with mild
surprise.

The
empereur
priest.

Fifteen hundred, Renee answered with a level gaze.

What! Burnette said, genuinely taken aback.

You don’t think I’m worth it?

Excuse me, one of the men behind Burnette interrupted, stepping forward to introduce
himself. Honey, from the looks of it I’d say you’re worth every penny.

Why, aren’t you sweet, Renee cooed.

Jack Parmentier, he said. If every sale is sealed with a kiss, I’m buying them all.

Aren’t you a riot, said Renee.

The sleepless gap between energies—slow and fast, passive and kinetic, Florida and
the Balkans, the good son of his mother and the good son of his country—proved to
be a fertile space for another invasive round of mind fornication by the daughter
of Steven Chambers, his obsessive reverie of Renee Gardner, breeding in the darkness
over the ocean and fading with the European dawn, the turmoil of his private thoughts
as good as banished by the stricture of his mission as the plane descended through
the fog into Sarajevo’s airport. On the ground she was gone, out of his head, and
she would stay gone throughout the following year, when he would neither see nor speak
to Dottie Chambers, a year of leap-frogging around the planet for Burnette, constant
travel marked by all-consuming but infrequent intervals of sudden violence, which
would remain with him not as memories but as cinematic clips, shown daily against
the screen of an untroubled, abstracted conscience. Even her photograph of the
empereur
would remain in the packing it was shipped in from Ybor City to Fayetteville, propped
against an empty wall in his barren living room.