Eden Burning (44 page)

“I don’t understand Nicholas,” he repeated. His voice was hollow and sad in his own ears.

For a moment Kate seemed to be making up her mind.
Then she said, “I want to show you something. Have you got an hour to spare, right now?”

“I’ll spare it.”

“You’ll have to get your car. Have you ever been at the Lunabelle Annex?”

“Over the causeway, you mean? No.”

“Over that little bridge you have to walk across, where the new cottages are.”

At the remote end of the Lunabelle’s beach, out of sight around the point and half a mile from the main building, they stopped the car. Tall grasses grew between the ruts of a secluded, sandy lane.

“Not used very much,” Patrick observed.

The footbridge spanned a narrow channel. A circle of quaint, peak-roofed cottages bordered the white beach along the little island’s rim. The backs of the cottages looked upon an oversized blue pool, amoeba-shaped. Parasols and expensive chairs stood on the silky lawn between the flower beds. It was very quiet. Only one couple, lying in the sun, looked up briefly as Kate and Patrick appeared and then went back to concentrating on the sky.

“Out of season,” Patrick said.

“It’s never crowded. This isn’t for the public, you know.”

“Isolated. One couldn’t guess it was here.”

“Exactly. Come, maybe there’s an open door. Or we can peek in.”

All the sliding glass doors were locked. But one could clearly see inside to rooms in which white velvet rugs lay on pink terrazzo floors and wide beds bore gilded carving; in one a lace robe had been left lying on a chair. A nineteenth-century, or possibly a twentieth-century, bordello must have looked or maybe still looked like this, Patrick thought, but did not say it.

“Bizarre, isn’t it?” Kate asked, as they walked back between oleander hedges to the car.

“Yes. Who are these people?”

“You can’t guess?”

He had some uncertain thoughts, but waited.

“The mob.”

He stared.

“I can’t prove it, although I suspect it strongly. More than suspect it. These men come down here from the states, bring their girls, do their business, and make their payoffs here in private where the government protects them.”

“Payoffs for what?”

“Dope, I think,” she said seriously, and as he still stared at her, she went on, “Why should you be surprised? Central America is ridden with it.”

He couldn’t answer that.

“You’re crushed because it’s Nicholas.” She touched his hand. “Of course, I could be wrong.”

“You’ve got to be wrong,” he said. “You’ve got to be.”

On the broad side lawn of Government House they passed a unit of police deploying, smart in their new gray uniforms with scarlet caps and scarlet trouser stripes.

“Stop a minute,” Kate commanded. “What do you see?”

When he did not understand immediately, she asked, “You mean to tell me you haven’t noticed them these last few weeks?”

“The style, you mean? Nicholas likes a certain amount of ritual and display,” Patrick offered, almost sheepishly.

“That’s not what I meant. Look again! When did we ever have so many police? Every one of them over six feet tall! They’re tough, and they’re all new men. There’s not one old familiar face, the faces we all knew. I wouldn’t be surprised—” she said and broke off.

“Surprised at what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Women are so damned exasperating! Will you please finish what you started?”

“Frankly, I’m not sure I should have trusted you today.”

“Well, thank you! Thank you very much! If that’s the way you feel, don’t bother to talk to me at all. Please don’t.”

“Don’t be huffy. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I meant that you’re a very loyal person, and very close to Nicholas in spite of the things you’ve been seeing. How can I know what your conscience, nagging at you in the middle of the night, will tell you to do?”

He softened. “Kate, anything you’ve ever said to me has gone no farther. You ought to know that.” It was the first time in a long while that he had made mention, however oblique, of Francis Luther.

She flushed. “All right, then.” She looked around and lowered her voice, although the car was moving. “There are rumors that a national police force is being gathered. They’ve even got a name: the Red Men.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be more efficient?”

“Don’t be dense, I’m speaking of a paramilitary force. Arrests in the night, mysterious disappearances, bodies dumped along the roads. Know what I’m talking about? You ought to know. It’s the history of the twentieth century, isn’t it?”

Shock went through him, down to his knees. “You can’t be serious! Who told—” He broke off. “Excuse me. Of course you can’t reveal it.”

“Of course I can’t. Let’s just say I have—sources.”

For a minute or two neither of them spoke. The car had stopped at Kate’s house, but she made no move to get out.

“Patrick. I’m terribly afraid.”

“It may not be what you think,” he suggested softly.

“If I had any guts I’d put it all in the
Trumpet.
But I have none, that’s the trouble.”

“Kate! Are you out of your mind? Don’t you dare!”

“You see, you do believe what you’ve been seeing, or you wouldn’t say that. In a free country, the press has nothing to fear, has it?”

He didn’t answer. Here were the old streets, the listless leaves, gray with dust, the muffling, sleepy summer heat, so
long familiar, now as threatening as some queer, twisted alley in a foreign place where nobody speaks one’s language.

Then he brought himself up short. This was jumping too hastily to conclusions! For all her intelligence, Kate was still a woman; women exaggerated; they were always drawn to the dramatic and the thrilling. He was about to say so when Kate spoke again.

“About Will—keep an eye on him. Tell him not to get mixed up in politics right now.”

“Why, what’s he doing?”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t say anymore. Just tell him to be careful.” And leaving Patrick with that enigma, she got out of the car.

Feeling faintly irritated by all the mystery, as well as with himself for his own fears, he drove away. It was market day downtown. Schooners from out islands were unloading woven baskets filled with iridescent pink and silver fish, as they had been doing for centuries past. But on the other side of the square a dozen or more young men and women waited in front of the airline office ready to depart for England or America, where they would drive the busses and collect the garbage: a better life, apparently, than they had waiting for them at home. He sighed and came back to his own affairs.

“Keep an eye on Will,” Kate had warned. Oh, by all means! And just how was he to do that? Will was a man now, or more a man than almost any other boy his age. You couldn’t pin him down!

“Where were you?” one would ask.

“Out with friends,” he would answer.

“Yes, but where?”

“Just walking around, down on the beach.”

You never could get more out of him than that. And what if you did pin him down, saying, “We know you spend time at the Trenches and we don’t want you to go there anymore.” What good would that do?

He wondered what Will and his friends really did talk
about, what interested them besides Che Guevara and Mao. No, not Mao anymore; he’d gone out of favor, like so many left-wing heroes. At Will’s age, Patrick thought, what I cared about were girls and books and wanting to know some more of the world. I wasn’t angry like him, I know that much. And I remember I could laugh a lot. Will never does, at least not when he’s home with us. No, you couldn’t pin him down.

Nevertheless, he asked point-blank that night, “Will, I want to know, are you mixed up in anything political?”

Will gave him a long look. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I’m worried. I don’t challenge your right to believe in what you believe, and by this time obviously I know what you believe. But I don’t think it’s safe for you to be too outspoken right now.”

“Right now? I thought this was supposed to be a democratic government. Free speech, freedom of thought and all that.” There was a taunt in the way Will said it.

Patrick found himself struggling, put once again on the defensive. “It is a democratic society! But it takes time to develop orderly democratic societies in which people think for themselves.” He mouthed and floundered, repeating, “It takes a long time, and in the meanwhile, during a period of stress—”

“Each of us has only one lifetime,” Will said. “How long are we supposed to wait? In the meanwhile,” he went on before Patrick could reply, “there’s been no change. Take the Francis family, the Tarbox family. The worker tends the bananas, and the profits go to a fancy house in England, or maybe the Riviera, or wherever else those people travel to make themselves comfortable.”

Back to the Francis family again. Always the Francis family. Strike, and strike the sore spot. Will knew how to do that!

“Tell me, are you so satisfied with what you’ve had since Mebane got in?” the boy demanded now.

“Not entirely, no, I’m not. But never forget, we’ve a way
to change things when we’re not satisfied. The ballot is our defense, a most precious defense. When you think how few peoples in the world have the right to vote, you’ll treasure what we’ve got.”

“Vote for this one, vote for that one—it makes no difference. I’ll take the Cuban way and you can keep your ballot.”

“Oh, it’s tempting, isn’t it? No vote, just one man, quick and efficient, who gets things done without a lot of committees and talk! Justice and equality at the stroke of the great man’s pen! Only it isn’t equality. Listen”—and earnestly now, trying to convince, to force the boy to understand it as he understood it, Patrick thumped his fist into his palm—“listen to me! Do you really think people are equal under those systems? Why, the leaders in Russia have every privilege and luxury that kings ever had, things the masses never even see. And what’s more, they have the power of life and death over those masses. Equality!”

“Life and death,” Will said. He spoke calmly. He looked off, looked at the wall behind and above Patrick’s head, as though he were considering whether to say something else or not. Then he stood, leaning with one elbow on the mantel, a habit which made Patrick nervous. Will made such abrupt movements, so rough and sweeping, and Désirée’s Royal Copenhagen figurines, those fragile blue-and-white milkmaids and goosegirls, patiently collected at Da Cunha’s, were so treasured. But he had never broken one yet.

“You know, of course, what’s happening with the Red Men,” he said at last.

“Happening?” Patrick repeated.

“Yes.” Will was patient, intense and old.

He’s never been young, Patrick thought, as eye contact was made between them. And he evaded. “Well, there are too many of them—”

Will interrupted. “It’s not what you see, it’s what you don’t see. It’s what they do when they take off the uniform, it’s the ones who never wear the fancy uniform at all. And
there are hundreds of them, that even you don’t know about. Talk of the power of life and deaths—” He broke off. “But you won’t want to hear because Nicholas is your friend.”

“He was a brother to me,” Patrick said slowly, as if murmuring to himself.

“Well. Brothers do strange things, too.”

To know so much, to be so cynical, at seventeen!

“You’re in the government, but you haven’t the faintest idea what the government is. Don’t you realize at all what’s going on behind your back? The Daniel sisters’ car crash last month—take that, for instance. You thought it was an accident?”

“Everyone thought so.”

“Not everyone,” Will corrected. “That car didn’t skid off the road. The sisters were shot by Red Men and then the car was shoved over the cliff. That’s what really happened.”

“But why?”

“They ran a whorehouse, a fancy place for tourists on the Westbrook Road. They were murdered because they got too sure of themselves and stopped paying off to Alfred Claire. That’s Mebane’s cousin—of course you know that. Don’t you see the whole family’s on the take, milking the country?”

“But where do you hear these things, Will? How can you say these things?”

“I say them because they’re true.” Will smiled. He had a one-sided, reluctant smile, almost wistful. “My friends and I—we have ways of knowing.”

Kate and her sources, Patrick thought. He was dazed. From the nature of democracy to Cuba and communism and now to whorehouses and murder, all in less than half an hour! How could he know who was telling the truth?

“I don’t know whether to believe all this,” he said.

And again Will smiled, that strange, touching smile.

“Believe it,” he said.

“The Mebanes are having a housewarming,” Désirée announced.

Nicholas’s house had been completed in the new community on the cliff at Cap Molyneux. Through Désirée, Patrick had been informed almost daily of its progress, its Italian tile, the pool, and the great curved room. “Like the prow of a ship,” she reported.

“I don’t want to go,” he told her.

“What! What can you be thinking of? Never mind my feelings and Doris’s if we don’t go, but how will it look? The only member of the government to stay away? And you on the executive committee?”