The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (13 page)

And this was how he thanked you for saving his life? Jackie asked Warrant Officer
Brooks. By giving you a black eye?

No, ma’am, answered Brooks.

That’s right, said Tet Rouge, sputtering with laughter. A lady stamped him with that
shiner.

Not a lady, Brooks said, slapping his hand on the table. Just a cunt.

Excuse him, ma’am, Eville said to Jackie.

Oh, give me a break, said Jackie. Women, cunts, bitches, whatever. What happened?

What happened, said Eville Burnette, is what happens when people aren’t more careful
about who they choose to disrespect. Up to a point, Jean Petreau understood this basic
code of survival, and when the three soldiers approached the door of the house where
Petreau held his hostage, and Warrant Officer Brooks called out,
Jean Petreau, goddamn it, I’m really busy today and I don’t have time to save your
life a second time,
Petreau himself opened the door to offer an effusive welcome to his old friend, explaining
that the Dutchman was not a hostage but a criminal, and Petreau had no choice but
to arrest him because the police would not,
but here,
says Petreau,
Here’s the guy, you can have him, I’m sick of him, to tell you the truth,
so they go in the house and there’s the ship’s captain trussed up in duct tape.

So we take him, said Burnette, but we take Petreau as well, drag them both to the
police station to sort this thing out. Finally the soldiers begin to understand the
heart of the matter: that the ship is loaded with contraband; that the owner had prepaid
the police but the ship’s captain had not been authorized to bribe both parties, Petreau
(the ancien régime) and the police (the nouveau régime).

Brooks, Burnette, and Tet Rouge head down to the harbor: they want to know what’s
on the ship, and they want to talk to the captain’s wife and determine what her role
is in all of this. Down on the quay, Petreau has parked a pair of thugs with little
spray guns to guard the ship but they are gracious enough to take flight at the sight
of American soldiers marching toward them, preceded by their reputation, but perhaps
Petreau has other men aboard the ship who might be more inclined to resist. They trudge
up the long, hot gangplank to midships, recon the deck, calling out words of peace
and comfort but no one’s responding and the vibe gets spooky. They trudge up to the
bridge, turn the corner around a wall, and here’s a fellow pointing a shotgun at them
and, compelled to raise their own M4s, they persuade him to lower the barrel and put
down his weapon.
Who are you?
they ask.
Where’s Madame?
They have boarded a ship owned by an American citizen and want to know if she needs
assistance. He’s the first mate from Martinique, and Madame is in the communications
room, down the passageway, next to the wheelhouse.

They try the handle; it’s locked. They knock on the door; no one answers, but they
can hear the woman inside on the ship-to-shore radio, shrieking in Spanish. Brooks
starts to kick down the door but on the third try the woman flings the door open at
the same moment Brooks’s boot would have made contact and his momentum propels him
off balance through the opening, where she’s waiting for him, the telephone-like receiver
from the radio clutched in her hand. She swings at him, and connects, pow, right in
the eye, and Brooks is looking at stars. Tet Rouge leaps ahead and she swings at him,
too, he grabs her wrist but she claws his face with her free hand and he staggers
back from this wildcat. Burnette is right behind Tet Rouge, shouting for the woman
to back away and calm down, but she gets him too, ripping the phone off its cord with
the force of her blow. Brooks comes to his senses and steps forward, rifle up and
aimed, but she commits a cardinal sin, seizing the muzzle of his M4 with both hands
and now here we have a real problem, said Eville. She and Brooks are engaged in a
tug of war over his rifle and he’s never going to let go and it seems neither is she.
The gun is pointed straight at her chest and suddenly she begins screaming in English,
Shoot me, you cocksucking American pig, shoot me, you yanqui motherfucker, shoot me,
shoot me,
which doesn’t sound like a bad idea but the safety’s on and Brooks isn’t going to
shoot anyone, is he? But you can’t overstate the seriousness of the situation, an
out of control woman with her hands on your gun, and so Burnette unholsters his pistol
and brings the butt down on her skull, which, sorry to say, does not do the job. There’s
blood pouring down her face but she has kept a death grip on the rifle and she’s still
screaming,
Shoot me, shoot me.

So what are my options? said Eville. I swing again and really crack her one with the
pistol butt and down she goes and it looks as if I killed her.

Man doesn’t know his own strength, said Tet Rouge.

I feel terrible about it, said Eville.

I feel good about it, said Brooks. I wish I had done it myself.

Jesus, said Tom Harrington. He was having fun with the story and now he would have
rather not heard any of it. Is she all right?

All that blood, man, said Brooks. The bitch probably gave us AIDS.

Don’t know, said Eville. We took her to the hospital. She’s in a coma. Skull fracture.
The owner’s threatening to sue the US government.

We’re the perps, said Tet Rouge. That’s how the story ends. We’re the bad guys.

So what was the whole thing about anyway? Jackie asked.

Just one of those crazy things, said Eville.

It was about a coke whore, man, said Warrant Officer Brooks. That’s all you need to
know. Not worth the bullet in my fucking rifle.

God, you’re quite the misogynist, aren’t you? said Jackie sarcastically, taunting
the soldier again, and Harrington glared at her.

No, ma’am, he’s not, said Tet Rouge. He just doesn’t like to argue with women.

Jackie seemed to think this answer was hilarious.

CHAPTER NINE

All Thomas Harrington knew, sitting with Conrad Dolan at the bar of the Hotel Oloffson,
his mouth sealed tight with anger while he waited to return to Miami for fund-raising
and grant applications, then off to a job interview in The Hague and the customary
slog toward survival and relevance,
amen
, was that he had suddenly been elevated to the role of love object among the pack
of intelligence hounds set upon the mission that was Haiti. Tethered out from the
acronymic spawn of agencies and departments and service branches that generated a
veritable Babylon of institutional incompatibilities, a classic orgy of interagency
perspectives were unable to agree on the answers to a set of elusively simple questions:
Who was Jackie Scott? Why was she no longer among the living? Why are we bothering
to care?

Among the troupe of players at the embassy, everyone—and that meant Connie Dolan too—seemed
to believe Tom had in some way volunteered to attend this event as its guest of honor.
No, thanks, gentlemen, he told himself, I am remitting myself to the one place I most
belong and that is home, to love my wife and raise my daughter and prepare my briefs
and white papers and be otherwise unavailable to the muddle.

Instead of trying to talk him out of it, Dolan turned the round chin of his priestly
face toward Harrington and said,
Listen, Tom,
and lowered his voice and his head and spoke about the girl with a damp expression
not unlike earnestness. Connie Dolan wanted to offer Harrington a few naked minutes
within his own reality.

He had met her less than a year ago, one Saturday afternoon aboard Parmentier’s sailboat
Payday
in Tampa Bay. Parmentier, yearning to show off the trophy that was his new bride,
had asked Dolan out to the boat three or four weekends in a row and finally Dolan
went, though not with any eagerness for the occasion, because Parmentier was an ugly
and often pointless complication in his life, and so although he could not be ignored
the less Dolan saw of him the better. The fact is, said Dolan, Parmentier had helped
him out on a major case. He ran Parmentier as his inside man on a scheme that lured
selected racketeers and mobsters from up north to cavort in the Florida sun, which
was only possible because Parmentier had a colorful résumé himself. This is what guys
like Dolan did, this is what guys like Parmentier did, and once they helped you, no
matter how much they misbehaved in the past or might transgress in the future, you
protected them, you were stuck with the precedents and the antecedents of protection,
even though you hoped they slipped in the bathtub and broke their necks. It was a
serious act, a dangerous and self-defeating act of irresponsibility and ultimately
dishonor, to cut loose informants and witnesses and sources, to reward them for their
trust by turning them into suckers and dupes and fools, and if that was old-school
then so be it, Connie Dolan was old-school. But there was always a limit on what you
might do for them, and you never knew where the edge might drop off into the blue
until one day you found yourself there and had no choice except to shove them over
and walk away, before they were inspired in their perpetual cleverness to do the same
to you. With Parmentier, maybe that day was fast approaching. Maybe not.

Despite the continuing necessity of his unpleasant relationship with Parmentier, Dolan
had balked at the social implications of meeting his informant’s wife, and couldn’t
begin to imagine the destructive stupidity of a woman who would marry or date or even
handle the cock of a man like Parmentier. Someone who must know herself only as dirt.
Someone wrapped up in the pernicious appeal of walking though life as a victim, victimhood
being the potter’s clay of martyrdom, martyrdom being the last resort of love.

That wasn’t Jackie, Tom interrupted.

Right, said Dolan, that wasn’t your gal Jackie. That was Renee.

Dolan found a parking space in the palmy shade at the marina and headed for Parmentier’s
slip out on the docks, a familiar clandestine rendezvous for both of them although
he had never known Parmentier to actually weigh anchor. Parmentier was in the open
cockpit with an ice chest and martini shaker and a bottle of vodka, wraparound sunglasses
obscuring his chestnut eyes and a Buccaneers cap pulled down over his shaggy black
hair, relaxing under a canvas awning, legs up on the cushions, his Cajun good looks
and the cheerful swagger of his pose suggesting the Errol Flynn version of a yachtsman,
while Renee, a sleek bronze goddess in a red-and-white striped thong bikini, glided
around the deck of the sloop, untying sails and clipping their points to the halyards,
methodically running down the checklist for casting off.
Honey,
Parmentier said,
stop dicking around for a minute and come here and meet Special Agent Connie Dolan
of the F for fuck you, every time, B as in bullshit, I.

He was not undercover, he was no longer even an active agent, but Dolan did not care
for this tiresome introduction. Wives were entitled to know one thing only about your
business, wherever it took you when you left the house in the morning: that you worked
very, very hard to secure their happiness. Beyond that you were creating the potential
for fatal indiscretions. And if your wife was a tramp, even, as he first suspected
of Renee, a crafty, high-end working girl, the exclusive spread of her legs limited
to satin-covered mattresses in five-star hotels, she came from a culture shaped and
burdened by the daily enforcements of the law and survival dictated a pragmatic formula:
a cop was a cop was a cop, never a friend; or, as a type of friend, then a type of
possession, a servant indentured by his own venality and cravenness, and this type
of friend could be found all the way up through the chain of command.

But if Renee was only now finding out who Dolan was in the world, discovering her
husband had managed to cultivate some unusual friendships, the news had no impact
on her preoccupation with the boat. From the bow she stretched on the balls of her
bare feet to wave hello to the men in the stern and called back for Parmentier to
start the small diesel engine belowdecks while she uncleated the ropes that moored
the
Payday
to her slip. Then Renee—Jackie—was pressed between them in the cockpit, smelling
of coconut oil, the gleam of her marvelous body causing Dolan to take a full swallow
from the can of beer pressed into his hand by Parmentier. She stood at the wheel,
its apex nearly as tall as she, geared the engine into reverse, and throttled up just
enough to nudge the sailboat backward out into the channel, then geared forward and
gently swung the bow toward the cut leading to the bay. She might have been a showgirl
onstage at a strip club the way the two men watched her, without words, intent only
on the supreme mystery suggested by the agility of her flesh, the most ordinary thing
and yet extraordinary.

Great ass on this girl, eh, Connie? said Parmentier, gesturing with his martini. As
if this were her cue to perform, Renee naughtily wiggled the tanned globes of her
exposed backside.

Dolan was not at all comfortable with the newlyweds’ lack of inhibition. Where did
you two kids find one another, if I may ask?

Sunday school, she said.

Crazier than that, man. An art gallery. Renee had a show.

When she turned to look over her shoulder at Dolan and shook the bangs out of her
face he was intrigued by the clarity of her expression, not obliging her husband but
mocking him, and Dolan thought to himself, Jesus Christ, Parmentier can start counting
the days until she moves on and up the line of credit. She turned the opposite direction
toward Parmentier and said, smiling without sweetness, make yourself useful now—he
had to stand up and take the wheel. Then Dolan watched the sinewy muscles in her arms
and legs bulge as she hauled and trimmed the mainsheet and the sailboat heeled into
the breeze with the awakening groan of an enormous beast. Parmentier, who had purchased
the boat primarily as an enchantment to use to procure women from the lounges and
raw bars and air-conditioned steak houses of the bay area, was euphoric, the captain
of beautiful moments made possible only by the labor and skill of others.

Parmentier’s answer teased out Dolan’s natural skepticism. What were you doing at
a gallery? Since when do you like art?

Come on, man. I’ve always liked art, I just don’t like to talk about it. You ever
heard anybody talk about it who made sense? But hey, I went to see Renee’s work. She
was having a show. Photographs of Haiti. Voodoo niggers, devil worship. Unbelievable
shit.

Yeah? What the fuck do you care about Haiti?

Hey, now, that’s another story.

Renee told Parmentier to cut the engine and he did, the noisy silence of the elements
now at the heart of a sudden exhilaration, thrumming wind and hissing water, the boat
singing its music of speed under sail. Point her up while I raise the jib, she ordered
Parmentier, but he didn’t understand the command and began to fall off the wind, spilling
the jib out in front of the boat and Renee shouted,
Turn the wheel to port, to port, to the left, damn it,
and Dolan sat back on the cushions of the cockpit chuckling at Parmentier, the sailing
hoodlum from New Orleans, a French Quarter party boy dopehead who had quickly figured
out dealing was the cheapest way of doing, the former pimp elevated to narcotrafficker
without the nautical acumen to know port from starboard, left from right, right from
wrong
.

When Renee resumed the helm, Dolan asked where she had learned to sail.

The Sea of Marmara.

Pardon my French, Mrs. Parmentier, but where in the fuck is the Sea of Marmara?

That’s what I said, said Parmentier.

The Sea of Marmara, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus Strait.

Turkey? As they talked, Dolan’s attention wandered to her left hand where it gripped
the wheel, the unexpected impoverishment of a modest gold wedding band on her ring
finger.

She only offered that her family had lived in Turkey for a few years and then she
noticed him staring at her hand and volunteered that she had never cared for the spectacle
of a diamond.

Get this, Connie, said Parmentier. She speaks Turkish. Arabic. French. Hey, what else,
honey? Some African crap.

You didn’t want a diamond? said Dolan, incredulous.

Parmentier had given her one, something overlarge and beyond expensive, custom-made
to match a gaudy ring he displayed on his pinkie, like something athletes receive
for winning championships, but she had tried to explain to him that she disliked ostentatious
jewelry and refused to accept it. They argued about the ring and its implications
for weeks. Finally Parmentier made a concession: his family and friends were not to
be given the opportunity to paint him as a cheap son of a bitch, therefore
. . .
if she would wear the diamond when they exchanged vows in front of a priest, during
the reception and dinner afterward and throughout their honeymoon, that would suffice
for his ego and reputation. But she would have none of it—no diamond, no priest, no
family and friends, no reception, none of the adornments or pieties of the matrimonial
sacrament, just the two of them in the Tampa courthouse, signing papers, a blasphemy
in Parmentier’s tribal world of approval through attainment by any means, every transgression
forgiven except disloyalty, and what could be a more incomprehensible and personal
betrayal than to deny your pals and blood relatives the bash of the century—a zydeco
band, tubs of oysters and crawfish and blue crabs, étouffé and gumbo coming out your
ears, an open bar stocked with the best call brands in endless supply, an ounce of
coke for his mates—on the day of your first and only wedding to a woman everyone could
see was too good to be true and better than you and no one thought you deserved. And
still he agreed to everything she wanted.

Chicks, said Parmentier, rolling his head with the pitch of the boat. Vodka splashed
his khaki pants as he refilled his martini glass. It’s what you can’t do for them
that really gets their attention. Am I right, Connie?

Really? said Renee. What is it you can’t do for me?

Hey, what did I tell you. From where he sat he blew a kiss toward the back of her
head. For you I can do everything, baby. Everything. That’s the deal.

I like that deal, she said.

She asked Dolan to man the winch on the mainsheet and he put all his strength into
it, struggling without effect, until she leaned over behind him and added her weight
to his effort, a leg braced for leverage against the top of the cockpit. The winch
clicked its teeth, the sail droned with an extra degree of tautness, the starboard
gunnel dipped closer toward the foaming water, and the race was on, the
Payday
inching ahead of another, bigger sailboat off their port headed for the last channel
markers before the open bay.

Five hundred dollars says she beats that cracker to the buoy, said Parmentier. You
in, Connie?

What, do I look nuts?

But the skipper of the second boat, a wood-hulled ketch, saw what the
Payday
had in mind and appeared determined to assert the right of way of his own more downwind
tack, sending one of his crew up front to add a jib to the sails, and trimming the
main for more power. As they approached open water, the wind and swells increased
and the boats tossed combs of spray into the air, surging forward like thoroughbred
horses, funneled toward the gate by a narrowing channel through banana-colored shoals.
By now they could see the angry skipper of the ketch trying to wave Renee off her
westerly tack and out of his lane but Renee had planted her feet and set her jaw and
seemed intent on maintaining her course. It soon became clear that to avoid a collision,
one boat, the winner, would have to cut across the bow of the other, yet neither boat
seemed capable of outdistancing the other by a full length before it reached the markers.
Parmentier had hopped unsteadily to his feet, cheering his bride onward against the
ketch, which was near enough now for them to hear its bearded skipper screaming at
Renee to fall off, and Dolan himself, though he wasn’t going to tell her what to do,
had begun pleading with her under his breath, in a minute or so he was sure the
Payday
would ram the ketch at midships and as he debated with himself whether to knock her
off the wheel and take the helm himself and end this senseless competition a curl
of black exhaust shot into the air over the ketch’s stern as her engine fired up and
she added speed.