The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (7 page)

I don’t want to talk about it.

How could you have possibly lost your soul?

I am not going to talk about it.

Look, metaphorically, everybody experiences—

Fuck. Metaphors. Fuck. Metaphors. Her words brittle and sharp and clipped. I’m not
talking about my imagination. This is not about the imagination.

What she said he didn’t understand, yet when he tried again—We all have our demons—he
sounded fatuous even to himself.

That’s not what I’m talking about, she insisted.

What in the hell
are
you talking about then? What is this all about?

Believe what you want.

All right, Tom said. Look, I believe you.

I don’t care, she blurted childishly, her hands fluttering upward, and Tom thought,
Oh, brother, ain’t this entertaining!
and concentrated on the unimpeachable reality of the road.

There were trees now shading the highway, generous and lovely, and two-room clapboard
houses side by side by side in the coolness beneath their canopy. The dusty shoulders
thronged with pedestrians, bicyclists, children in school uniforms, wandering goats.
Occasionally a boy would lean out toward the car, dangling a line strung colorful
with reef fish or gripping a brace of spiny lobster by their antennae. Jackie did
not remark upon this sudden oasis of life surrounding them and they rode through the
village in the new silence of the contorted intimacy of her secret. They now knew
each other less by knowing each other more—at least Tom felt so. The allure had drained
from the tantalizing shell of her perfection, the robust clichés of her youth and
unblemished femaleness, and he felt pointlessly manipulated. Their conversation had
not been engaging, it had only been weird and dumb, and Jackie’s alleged loss of soul
and the evasiveness that followed, her refusal to yield as much as a particle of explanation
to appease Tom’s incredulity, seemed a variation on cock teasing, and he thought again,
cruelly, glibly,
How many years are required of us on this earth before you can plunge yourself into
serious moral complications and actually have a soul worth losing, or do we arrive
afflicted by the original sin of our births?
His brain idled on such thoughts, the abandoned catechism of a Roman Catholic upbringing,
as they accelerated away from the village and Jackie, to his astonishment, continued
her inquiry.

Do you think he can help me? she said.

Who? Help you what?

This voodoo person. Help me get my soul back.

I don’t know. Ask Gerard.

I am a Christian, Gerard protested from the backseat, and Tom doubted whether he had
heard such nonsense between
blans
in his entire life.

But he’s a priest, right? she persisted. A type of priest.

Yes, a
houngan,
Tom said again. The best ones were keepers of an encyclopedic knowledge of folk medicine,
they were repositories of the history of their people, they single-mindedly preserved
the songs and rituals that shaped the Haitian psyche, they practiced healing and they
battled against darkness, as any truly religious person does. The worst ones trafficked
in nightmares, when they weren’t trafficking narcotics. I don’t know if this
houngan
in Saint-Marc is a good one or a bad one, he said, and if she was determined to see
a priest, why not start on more familiar ground and go speak to a Catholic priest,
someone with whom she might at least share a culture and common language of faith.

They don’t know anything, she said matter-of-factly. They’re part of the whole fucked-up
problem.

You’ve talked with them then? he asked, and received, in the peripheral frame of his
glance, a thin-lipped frown and an angry toss of her head in reply. No answer. No
comment. My spokesperson will have a statement for you in the morning. Jackie was
beginning to rattle him. Lost your soul, eh? Tell me about it. Lost your soul? Listen,
who cares? He tried to stop caring, that occupational habit, but for Tom caring was
a need, however deformed, and he couldn’t make it go away, he could only be a smart
aleck about it.

They crested a bald hill at a speed that caused a moment’s sensation of levitation
inside the car, the threat of being sent airborne, and Tom swerved wildly to avoid
a broken-down tap-tap parked half in the road, throwing Jackie into his side, their
first touch, neither of them wearing seat belts. The lurching awoke Gerard out of
his doze and Tom heard him clear his throat and spit out the window—the money was
a godsend but Tom was fully aware that this day so far was beneath Gerard’s dignity,
chauffeured around like some missionary boy—and Jackie, straightening up in her seat,
seemed utterly unconcerned with both Gerard’s presence and Tom’s recklessness. Below
them, the white sand of a crescent, palm-lined beach beckoned like a postcard, and
they descended to where the road hugged the coast between sheer mountains and turquoise
sea, such an inviting sea, the moist brine of its air a balm to the senses.

Several more miles up the road they flew by the entrance to the Moulin Sur Mer and
went on to Saint-Marc and through the decaying hive of its center to the northern
outskirts, in search of the metaphysically puzzling spark of whateverness the young
and beautiful and immensely troubled Jacqueline Scott had declared as her soul.

That air of unfathomability that intelligent young women cultivated—what was that
about, that calculated? that subconscious? that natural? turn in the self toward the
art of deception? I am more than you see, and what you see is flesh? Duality (body
and soul) begets duplicity (self and self and self and self, and who could dare say
which one was real)? In any case, Jackie’s soul was gone.

Don’t laugh, she said, and Tom didn’t, but neither did he mourn or suffer, as one
might, somewhere in one’s own soul, at the loss of another.

CHAPTER FIVE

Above the city, high enough to give everything below its balconies the distance required
to establish an appreciation for the disfigured beauty of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel
Montana, flush from the windfall of the occupation, had renovated its terraces since
Tom Harrington’s last visit, adding brooklike fountains and goldfish ponds, an oval
poolside bar, a marble-tiled dining area open to sweet mountain breezes. Bougainvillea
cascaded over the ledges into the clouds that passed above another less generous world.
The elevation was not simply a physical fact of the hotel but a bracing state of mind
as well, a reassuring sensibility, suggesting that the Montana was a fortress and
sanctuary, evidenced most bluntly by the shotgun-carrying guard manning its steel
gate, a secure oasis of calm luxury and competent service, a symbolic outpost for
the globalization that Americans and Europeans, in their smiling overconfidence, were
convinced would be tomorrow’s remedy for what ailed poor Haiti. The United Nations
ran its office out of a ground-floor apartment; corporate businessmen met superbly
dressed government ministers on the patio for lunch. Dignitaries stayed here, foreign-aid
impresarios, mainstream correspondents intolerant of local color and unreliable phone
lines, and now men like Conrad Dolan, private detectives on open-ended expense accounts.
Scruffs lodged downtown at the infamous Oloffson, which Tom preferred, falling asleep
to the disturbing lullaby of gunfire beyond the compound’s walls, although more often
than he would have liked the nature of his business had made him a guest at the Montana,
where his status as a professional would inflate in proportion to the surroundings.
At least at the Oloffson, Tom reasoned, you knew you were in Haiti, not hovering above
it with all the answers.

He left his bags and passport with Dolan, who lingered at the front desk, waiting
for an introduction to the manager, and took a stool at the small bar off the lobby,
the only customer and a greedy one, silently imploring the bartender to hurry with
his rum sour, then drinking it down in gulps and ordering another, his thoughts clotted
with the once living Jackie. He wanted to feel more for her—the anguish of her mortality
and the terrible fullness of grief—but it wasn’t there; wasn’t, at least, available,
and what he did not want to feel was what he seemed most in danger of, an ugly spreading
stain of guilty relief that she was as far out of his life as the dead could be. But
she was dead and he could not tell himself he was glad about it.

In a trance of return and memory, he gazed out toward the lobby as Connie Dolan stepped
into it, paying a bellboy to carry the luggage to their rooms and Dolan then removed
his blazer, hooking it over a shoulder with two fingers, turning and planting his
feet to the expanse of the room, fixing himself into place with a predatory scan but
there was nothing, nobody to merit his attention—two middle-aged white women on a
bamboo-print couch sharing a pot of tea—until through the archway of the bar he spotted
Tom, who regarded his approach for the first time with a healthy measure of suspicion.

Dolan eased himself down on an adjacent stool and wanted to know what Tom was drinking
and they had an end-of-a-long-day contretemps, a testy little argument about whether
Barbancourt or Havana Club, Flor de Caña or some swill Dolan had tasted in Bogotá,
was the best rum in the world, and then as if to spite Tom, he ordered a vodka tonic
and offered the gratuitous opinion that rum was an inferior liquor regardless of where
it was manufactured or by whom. They shared a minute of petulance, nothing to say
to each other while they finished their round and then backed up and began a fresh
start with another, watching mindlessly the vivid green limes in the bartender’s black
fingers, sliced and squeezed.

What was her name anyway?

Who? Dolan cocked his head just far enough to acknowledge Tom’s drink, Tom’s hand
on his drink, if not Tom himself.

Dolan’s cooling into dyspeptic impersonality, both puzzling and a growing irritation,
seemed to serve final notice that their relationship would not enjoy the harmony Tom
had expected, that far from being Dolan’s guide and counsel, he felt himself being
drawn into some vaguely macho competition, Dolan willing to challenge every trait
of Tom’s, every insignificant decision and idle preference, on the base scorecard
of who’s winning and therefore who’s not. Tom told himself to try not to make too
much of it, that Connie Dolan was a cop and he was just being a cop, a big nasty dog,
hard-nosed, mistrustful, and untrustworthy, not his sudden best friend or any friend
at all. Jackie’s real name, Tom said with more sincerity. Back at the airport you
said Jacqueline Scott was not her name.

Dolan shook his head and grinned, easing the tension between them. Dorothy Kovacevic.

You can’t expect me to believe that.

Born and christened Dorothy Kovacevic.

Oh, Christ, that’s awful, said Tom. That’s like a brand name for old women in Chicago.
Dorothys wore shapeless blue wool coats. Babushkas tied under hairy chins. Breath
rank with stewed cabbage.

I guess she felt that way, too. Her family and friends called her Dottie. Mother was
from the Midwest—Kansas, Missouri, one of those
. . .
that might explain Dorothy. Her father was Croatian, immigrated after the war, ended
up in the diplomatic corps. But Dorothy Kovacevic isn’t her real name, either. When
she was still a toddler, the father legally changed the family name to Chambers. Has
a nice all-American ring to it, I guess was the point.

Dottie fits. So, why Jacqueline Scott?

Why Renee Gardner? said Dolan, not looking to Tom for the answer, but explaining that
Renee Gardner was the name she had used on her marriage license to his client.

Tom was flummoxed by what seemed to be a private and complicated joke—the surplus
of names, this strange proliferation of make-believe. Dottie, Jackie, Renee
. . .
Get it?

No.

He knew more than one person who had cried
Time’s up!
on whoever they happened to be at some stage in their lives, the season of their
happiness shifting underneath them. A salesman who wanted to be a doctor, a mother
who no longer wanted to be a mother, Tom himself a journalist who walked off the beat
and out of the newsroom and went to law school, but none of them changed their names
every time they changed their minds about who they were. Yet there was in him a general
sense of women in constant passage from one identity to the next, starting with their
own biology. Could a woman even recall a self without breasts and hips, or remember
loving the firmness of those breasts and hips after the trial of childbirth or the
malfunctioning furnace of menopause. Every woman he had ever known who woke up one
day sick and tired of
something
in her life by lunchtime had lopped off her hair for the superficial relief of becoming
someone else. The daily cosmetic painting and repainting of identity seemed to create
a psychic disconnect between who a woman was and who she needed to be in her dissatisfaction
with herself, and how, in the midst of all this flux and fabrication, the redirection
and repackaging and metamorphosis, was a man supposed to hold a clear idea of who
any woman, even the one closest to him, was? And yet to know a woman too well
. . .
was that a greater or lesser option? There were good answers, Tom knew, and answers
that were very, very bad.

Who does that? he wanted Connie Dolan to tell him. Who needs so many aliases?

Dolan peered at him not unkindly and told Tom he had been around the block enough
to know the answer—criminals, cons, crazy people. Actors, spies, strippers. Runaways.
Refugees.

Harrington’s first reaction was to resist these categories but he sighed and said,
So which was she?

You tell me.

Maybe none of the above.

Maybe all of the above.

Come on, Tom snorted. A stripper?

I’m serious, my friend.

She was a lost soul.

What the fuck’s a lost soul? That’s everybody and nobody. We’re all lost souls, are
we not? Let me ask you this—do you believe in original sin?

No. What kind of question is that?

You’d be better off if you did. Because then the governing principle in your life
would be the rising up, not the falling down. Repair and improvement. You see what
I’m saying?

But Tom ignored Connie Dolan’s barstool theology except to say that Jackie—he could
not think of her as other than Jackie—traveled with an entourage of demons and so
maybe, said Tom, taking quite a leap, her death was a mercy killing, an exorcism,
maybe she welcomed her death, the fucked-up bitch—anyway, that was Tom’s theory on
his third round of rum sours and Dolan stared at Tom with a derisive smile bunched
to one side of his mouth and said, What a load of shit, and went to his room to shower
before dinner. Harrington moved to the poolside bar and watched the darkness seep
down the mountain into the city and the lights, one by one, make it lovely.

I usually don’t drink so much, Tom said, coming late to breakfast on the sunny terrace
where Dolan, more casually dressed than the day before—polo shirt, blue jeans, running
shoes; the meringue of his hair damply flattened—stabbed sections of papaya from
a bowl of fruit salad.

I usually do, said Connie Dolan.

Monsieur,
Harrington called to a waiter walking past.
Café, s’il vous plaît. Omelette avec jambon et fromage.
Turning back toward Dolan he asked, What’s the plan?

They had not talked about a plan at dinner but instead Tom had pushed his
griot
around on his plate in a fog of rum and occasionally listened to Dolan’s tales of
his eight years with the Bureau in Puerto Rico, locking up miscreants and vermin,
until Tom had abruptly held up his hand for him to stop and said he wanted to know
how Dolan had discovered that he had an association with Jacqueline Scott. Dolan said
he had read it in a report, and Tom, of course, did not take this information well—he
could vaguely recollect shouting; oh, Christ, he wasn’t shouting, was he?—at Dolan,
who made no attempt to calm him down but said sympathetically that there wasn’t much
there. Just two or three lines alleging that, in 1996, Thomas Harrington, a human
rights lawyer under a UN-funded contract to the Haitian government, and the deceased
(Dorothy, Jackie, Renee) had traveled together to the northwestern cantonment of Limbé
and, in the vicinity of the village of Bois Caïman, had been involved in an altercation
of unclear nature with followers of the alleged gang leader, Jacques Lecoeur. Tom
was speechless and finally croaked, That’s it? feeling a bolt of panic and then another
bolt of paranoia shoot through the rum, and Dolan had eyed him curiously and said,
That’s it.

There was nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary about the existence of the report
itself, which had been copied at the American embassy in Port-au-Prince and passed
to Dolan by an old friend of his in the Miami office of the Bureau—PIs were dead in
the water if they couldn’t rely on old friends in law enforcement or the clerks of
the court. The parties involved in the murder were American citizens and, after interviewing
his client in Florida, the Bureau had sent a team of agents to Haiti to figure things
out, but they botched it, said Dolan, they were dumber than pet rabbits, they didn’t
talk to the coroner, they didn’t talk to the cops who took her body away that night,
they never bothered to take a look at the car, and they resurfaced in Miami forty-eight
hours later with much the same information with which they had started.

At that moment, though, Tom Harrington had no interest in who had killed Jackie or
why. All he wanted to know was who was the source of this report and how had he ended
up in it. Dolan said it wasn’t anything to worry about. When the agent had interviewed
his client in the federal lockup in Miami, his client had suggested that his wife
had an enemy or two in Haiti, and that the Bureau should talk to a driver named Gerard
Hurbon, and although the Feds did track down Gerard, who subsequently named Tom Harrington
and mentioned Tom’s trip up north with the girl, they never pursued the lead, according
to Dolan, because they already had fallen in love with the scenario of least resistance
to their limited capacity to operate in a place like Haiti. Here was a guy who had
arranged a contract killing of his wife for what else but the money, and chosen Haiti
as the venue for the crime because who was ever getting to the bottom of anything
in Haiti.

The problem was, said Dolan, his client was adamant that the life insurance policy
was
her
idea; maybe he was lying but how do you prove the assignation of an idea. So after
all this, Dolan wanted to know from Tom if the girl had any enemies in Haiti, and
Tom had sucked the dregs off the ice from his last of too many drinks and said, yeah,
I guess she did, and went straight to bed, his mind not spinning but pickled in astonishment,
trying to understand how Eville Burnette had escaped mention in this report, or if
for some unimaginable reason Connie Dolan was keeping that card facedown on the table.

So here’s what we’ll do, said Dolan as Tom revived himself with bitter coffee. First
and easiest, talk to the accountant, already arranged by Dolan, and on cue the Montana’s
obese accountant, Monsieur Frantz, walked duck-footed across the terrace, his white
dress shirt like a broad sail on a barge of hips, the knot of a pink tie loosened
around his enormous neck.
That’s possibly the biggest man in Haiti,
Tom thought, marveling at not a drop of sweat on all that flesh while Tom himself
had, by the simple act of eating, already soaked his collar and underarms, but the
mystery ended when the two Americans stood to shake Monsieur Frantz’s hand, which
was as wet as a dishwasher’s, and Tom absorbed this greater marvel, a fat man whose
sweat glands seemed to reside solely in his palms. The accountant dragged a chair
out several feet from the table and slowly lowered himself into it, closing his eyes
for a moment and bowing his head in reverence, his face a dark moon of regret, and
declared without prompting, Oh, poor Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith was a very nice man.