The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (72 page)

On the kitchen table she had set out plates of cold sausage and hard-boiled eggs for
the men and they ate while she stood at the stove, smoking an acrid-smelling cigarette
while she waited for water to boil for coffee. Vasich spoke to Burnette in English
with his mouth full. It was early in the war, the Yugoslavs were shelling Dubrovnik,
and I was there with General Gotovina, organizing the resistance. During that time
the Croatian Serbs attacked this town, do you understand, and I could not protect
my family. His wife brought two demitasses of coffee to the table and the colonel
talked to her and she left the kitchen and came back minutes later carrying the dog
in one arm and a full gym bag in her free hand. Okay, said the colonel to Burnette.
Finished? Let’s go.

They drove south through the hills of Dalmatia for hours, crossing the border back
into Bosnia near a place called Imotski, arriving at their destination, the Serb-controlled
western half of Mostar, at twilight. Okay, my friend, beware, said the colonel, as
they entered the town. Everyone here is the devil, and he advised Burnette to place
his pistol at the ready in his lap. He followed Vasich’s directions to a part of the
old city until Vasich said, Okay, park here, please, engine running. Three doors down,
you see there, we are going into that café. Count sixty, my friend, and then you must
go. Go where? asked Burnette, and the colonel said, After sixty, leave. With us, please
God, or without us, as God wishes, but you must go and find your way back to Sarajevo.
As Vasich spoke Burnette’s eyes were on the rearview mirror, watching the woman remove
a handgun from her gym bag. You will be fine, my friend, said the colonel, reaching
across the seat to squeeze his shoulder, a gesture Burnette would remember more than
any other. Thank you, Vasich said. Sixty, and then you must go.

They each made the sign of the cross and got out of the SUV and his wife carried the
dog hugged to her bosom, using its body to conceal her pistol, the colonel’s own pistol—an
HS2000, a Croatian-made polymer-framed semiautomatic—in the right pocket of his coat.
Burnette began his count as they disappeared into the café, inching the vehicle forward,
his left hand on the steering wheel and his right hand gripping his gun. By sixty,
everything was as it had been at zero, and by ninety he was almost parallel to the
entrance of the café when he heard the boom of a shot and then another and then the
door flew open and a man with a pistol back-stepped out onto the sidewalk and began
firing into the café and Burnette tapped the horn to draw his attention and when the
man turned to face the street, Burnette waited a split second for the guy to aim at
him and then lasered his breastbone and shot him. Even as he fell to the ground, it
seemed, the colonel and his wife were leaping over his body and into the car. What
is your count? said Vasich as they skidded away. Burnette said, One twenty, and Vasich
said, My apologies, sorry to take so long.

Who did I just shoot? Burnette asked and the colonel told him, An asshole. Darkness
cloaked the outskirts of town and they passed into the countryside without incident.
The throttle of Burnette’s heartbeat idled down, his brain stuck in an absurd loop,
thinking about the dog. What happened to the dog, he finally asked and Vasich said,
The dog was old. Right, said Burnette, somehow released and assured by this nonsensical
answer. In the rearview mirror he scanned the gloom of the backseat, able to just
make out the silhouette of the woman, wiping her eyes with the cuffs of her jacket.

Self-defense, said Dottie. Her spine was nailed against the passenger door, her legs
stretched out across the seat and the soles of her bare feet warm against his thigh
as she watched him talk, examining Eville’s broad face, his gaze down the road, bluish
in the moonlight.

You know, whatever, he said with a faint sneer in his voice, a hint of scorn. I’ve
never worried about it.

Of course he spurned her facile offer of absolution. There would be no pardons or
amnesty or exemption for someone like Eville. She had known this caste of man her
entire life and they did not require expiation; perhaps they only needed this, the
one thing different than a comrade or a priest—a woman to listen to them, at night
on an untraveled road, with some truthful measure of sympathy, until the anger passed,
and their doubts.

Right, she said.

Two men, both faced death. I lived, he didn’t, and what more is there to say about
it? You hear stories all the time, he said. Some you figure are sincere, there’s dignity,
self-respect, or they’re rituals, you know, like penance; some sound plain phony,
the hand wringing, the weepy confession, the self-justifying emotions. Guys whack
somebody and afterward have a come-to-Jesus reckoning or something, they look at the
dead guy and feel awful regret, they wake up in the middle of the night in a cold
sweat, saying to themselves that miserable son of a bitch was my brother and I killed
my brother. I never felt any of that. But what I told you really isn’t the story I
think I should tell, he said, turning toward her with a grim, furrowed look, making
a specious impression, she thought, that he had challenged her moral universe, a place
he should know by now was impenetrable. You want to hear the rest, or have you had
enough for one night?

I want to hear it, she said.

I’ll make this quick, Eville told Dottie, determined, it seemed to her, to unload
and shut up and withdraw, his energy losing its boost in these early hours of their
new day and its undefined togetherness, its potential for harmony not yet resolved
and its pattern for volatility already established.

So, he continued. Got back to Sarajevo, checked in, and I find out my boys are there,
my squad—Tilly, Spank, Scarecrow—tied in with some of your guys, SPECAT, Agency contractors,
and a pair of investigators from the Bureau—man, that’s oil and water—and they’ve
set up surveillance on some jihadi safe house, they’ve reconned the target and are
intercepting message traffic and developing a plan to go kinetic and so I hook up
with the op and we take the place down, this apartment in some fleabag hotel on the
edge of town. The entry goes fairly well, we have to tape a cutting charge on the
door and blast it off, start clearing rooms, there’s five gooks inside and one of
them gets a round off at Tilly, who’s right in front of me, and he’s okay, it hits
his body armor at an angle, cracks a lower rib and sends him sprawling but I don’t
know that he’s okay and I’m a lightning strike on the shooter, I’m right there, I’m
Cassius Clay in the jungle, man. Orders were we want them breathing or that guy was
mailed to paradise. I swung the stock of my M4 into his face like a baseball bat and
then kicked the shit out of him when he dropped to his knees. That should have been
the end of it, right? I turned back to see about Tilly and he was huffing but struggling
to his feet, and when I turned back to the shooter one of the SPECAT guys had already
flex-cuffed him into a chair, he’s spitting out teeth and he’s bleeding from the nose
and mouth, he’s bleeding from a dent in his forehead, and I walked over there and
walloped him so hard I broke his fucking jaw and somebody pulled me off saying, Hey,
cowboy, save something for the Egyptians.

So I cooled down and we started going through the apartment, bagging up the haul.
Computer files, fake US government ID badges, credit cards and European bank accounts,
photos of landmarks in the States. Video tapes, man. Chem warfare on dogs, bomb making,
kidnapping, not to say anything about the porno, and one video from a training camp
in Afghanistan with these dirtbags in Sinbad pajamas rehearsing to kill world leaders
at a friggin’ golf tournament. Now listen to this. I’m checking out a pile of documents
and crap and I find an envelope and inside are plane tickets, like five or six of
them, most going to London or Germany but there’s one that originates in Islamabad
connecting in Madrid to Santo Domingo and the final destination—want to guess?—was
Port-au-Prince. You heard about that, right?

No, she said. It never came through the pipes.

Yeah, well there it is, he said. Small world.

Daddy’s world, she refrained from saying, talking to herself. Everyone against Dad.

The Bureau team is tussling with the SPECAT team over who has dibs on what. Meanwhile,
we have five detainees and a zip-bag full of passports and my squad is trying to sort
that out, snapping digital pics and uplinking them to our database, trying to determine
the catch, who’s who, you on our playlists or not, and we’re working the stream, I’m
fishing the passports, and suddenly the anti-cupid shoots me with a hate arrow, I’m
looking at a match and it tells me the guy who winged Tilly is a Pakistani with connections
and I just go off, for the third time I’m wailing on him, Spank has just put ten stitches
in the guy’s forehead and I yank them right out with my fingernails, I’m screaming
in his bloody face, Tell me about Khan, tell me about this plane ticket, and I’m knocking
his brains out and the Bureau guys are saying, Dude, he’s defenseless, that ain’t
right, and the SPECAT guys are saying, Whoa, killer, save some of that for our friends,
and finally Scarecrow gets me in a headlock and pulls me away, saying, Burn, come
on, man, have you lost your mind? And all I’ve been thinking about ever since is something
that aikido instructor told us out in California—the warrior must descend all the
way into his body and soul and live in that gap where the world falls apart.

What I want to know is, what does that really mean, said Burnette, pounding the steering
wheel with the side of his fist. I lost it in that room in Sarajevo. My mind—gone.
No argument. What worries me is what I found, what remained after everything else.
No more wondering who you are, because here you are, pal.

What was it? she asked.

My soul, man. That’s what you find in the gap where things fall apart. You descend
to your soul.

Tell me what you mean, she said. This interests me.

I don’t know, he said, a rise of escaping anguish, squelched. I’m all over the place
with it. What does it mean,
true to myself
?
I feel righteous, the next minute I’m ashamed. Or just disgusted.

Ev, she said, you’re a decent man, an appraisal that he, of course, promptly ignored.
Can I say something, she asked with quiet adamance. So don’t be a coward, don’t be
a hypocrite—choose your crime, she said. Isn’t that right?

Right, said Eville. There’s the rock, there’s the hard place.

People who won’t choose sides. They don’t accept they’re responsible for everything
bad that happens.

Vasich’s wife, he said. She shoved the dog in the guy’s face. Kiss my boy’s dog, you
bastard. Pulled the trigger.

So what do we call that? said Dottie. Crime of war, crime of dereliction, abdication,
passion? Crime of what?

I don’t know, he said.

I think about this all the time, she said. I don’t think everybody who hurts us should
be forgiven.

Maybe that’s right, he said, but it cuts both ways.

They approached a well-lit roundabout with an unmanned guard post at its center. Hey,
said Eville, Camp Lejeune. He stuck his left arm out the window, pumped his fist in
a salute, and hollered
Semper fi!
and seemed to feel better for it, the moment’s interjection of esprit de corps, as
they passed into the sonambulent confines of the marine base, sharing, it seemed to
her, a tacit agreement to ride on in silence, meandering in the lowlands of their
own thoughts, Dottie imagining tonight was her first encounter with an honest man.
Everything’s either cartoons or Tolstoy, she thought. Who’s playing games? We die,
they go to the movies.
No wonder the boys clam up,
she thought, stifling their doubts.
And who am I to blame them?
she reasoned with herself. In her own vocabulary of self and experience, exposure
meant
to be extinguished,
and honesty meant a reliable hell-bent shortcut to extinction.

On the military base, the fields and their silvered crops vanished into the primordial
forests and mossy blackwater swamps of the Croatan Indians and Walter Raleigh’s Lost
Colony, the road sandwiched by insect-pulsating walls of leafy darkness blinking with
fireflies. They emerged from this wilderness into an all-night mile of off-base decadence,
servicemen’s bars and strip joints, tattoo parlors and bail bondsmen, patrol cars
cruising past sidewalks clustered with Friday night brotherhoods of hooting, callow
marines, invincible stumble-drunk boys with shaven heads and a deep yearning for faceless
enemies. Then Highway 70 took them into Morehead City’s deserted streets, then out
onto the causeways over to Beaufort and north toward Cedar Island, one of the old
fishing settlements they sped through named Smyrna, not that she was on the lookout
for omens, Eville tight with fatigue as they turned off the main road into the watermen’s
hamlet of Atlantic and found the marina he had read about and turned down toward the
harbor to park behind an industrial-sized pickup truck with balloon tires and a walk-in
camper weighing down its bed.

I’ll be damned, Eville said, his head craned out the window. There’s already a line.

The moon had set into the westward spread of the continent and she could make out
nothing beyond the vehicle in front, fishing rods rising straight up from its bumpers
like a grove of radio antennae. A line for what? she said groggily, while still another
truck took its place behind them.

She woke with the sound of the door closing and the engine starting again, half-conscious
and feeling crappy, Eville, in a new kelly-green ball cap embroidered with a brassy
fish, dog-faced tired but smiling as he handed her coffee and a sausage biscuit he
had purchased in the marina store. She put the coffee in the cup holder and the sandwich
in her lap and tried to focus, the truck in gear now and edging forward down a ramp.
There were spartina marshes and the slate-colored expanse of Core Sound and out to
the lavender mist of the horizon where they were going the low profile of the North
Core Banks, and she thought somewhat obtusely, Water changes everything.