The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (15 page)

Is that why you’re taking me? Because I’m pretty?

Forget it, he said, shaking his head. He had been at the Oloffson long enough to enjoy
early morning kitchen rights, permission to make coffee before the staff arrived.
Would you like some? he asked, holding the pot over an empty cup and she nodded.

No, really, she said, unwilling to not challenge him. That’s the reason, isn’t it?

You sure run hot and cold, don’t you?

What do you mean? she said archly.

He drank his coffee because he wasn’t going to say any more. Yesterday he had put
aside his identity to be with her but today he had folded himself back into the resolve
of his profession and could not let himself be distracted by a neurotic woman. They
sat for several minutes without speaking, listening to the flute of birdsong below
in the gardens, Jackie’s head bowed, the purse of her lips inches from the rim of
her cup. Finally she sighed and raised her eyes and looked at him, her mouth gradually
forming a half-smile of contrition.

Sorry. Okay?

What we have to do is very difficult. You have to trust me. We have to get along.
It will be a serious mistake if you go and you don’t trust me and we don’t get along.

I know, Jackie said, reaching across the table to take his hand and squeeze it with
reassurance. We will. Just don’t underestimate me because I’m a female. That would
be a mistake too. That’s all I meant to say.

Our friends in the Special Forces will appreciate that.

Oh, my God, that woman beat the shit out of those guys, didn’t she, and they both
laughed and Tom felt more at ease.

Gerard arrived and they drove to the airport and then to the opposite perimeter of
the compound where the UN had established its headquarters and Gerard waited while
Tom and Jackie went inside to add her name to the flight manifest but immediately
there was a problem. No matter how many times Tom waved his documentation in the face
of the flight operations manager and insisted that the photojournalist be allowed
to accompany him on his official mission to the north, the ops manager repeated mechanically
that Jacqueline Scott had not been properly accredited and was ineligible for free
rides on military helicopters. The argument brought the public affairs officer—a friend
of Tom’s who tried to help—out from his cubicle but when Jackie couldn’t produce any
ID affiliating her with a media outlet or NGO, there was nothing he could do but smile
cockeyed at Tom and his little friend.

Walking back to the SUV Tom asked her how bad she wanted to go and she said how bad
do you think and he hated to see her crestfallen and felt a sudden strong need not
to disappoint her. Okay, he said, let’s talk to Gerard and see if he’s up for a trip,
but Gerard took him aside and confessed he did not want to drive all day alone with
this
foo
white woman who had lost her soul and he didn’t understand why Tom wanted her along
when he already had a taste of what a problem she could be.

She’s a photographer, this could be an important story. She wants to work, and you
want to work. True?

I don’t know. I don’t trust this woman, but Gerard nevertheless agreed to take her
north.

Jackie thanked Tom but Tom said thank Gerard. He promised they would all ride back
together in the SUV in two or three days. They drove out on the tarmac to the Chinook
helicopter the UN leased from the Americans and Tom walked around under the tail of
the bird and handed his rucksack to the cargo chief who checked his name on the manifest
and handed him earplugs. Tom looked at the clipboard and up the ramp of the Chinook
into the tubular cave of its interior, its center deck loaded with palettes of supplies
and the seats along both sides of the fuselage unoccupied but for a squad of Caricom
policemen and three civilians he assumed were contract employees. He turned back to
the cargo chief and said not many passengers.

We pick them up in Gonaïves.

Tom nodded toward the SUV where Jackie and Gerard were still standing. See that girl
over there?

Yes, sir.

Let’s take her along.

No can do. Bird’s full after Gonaïves.

She’ll sit in your lap, man, he said.

I wouldn’t make it through the flight, sir.

He walked back to tell her he had tried and that he would reserve rooms for both of
them at the Hotel Christophe and see them there at cocktail hour. Out of the habit
of Haitian manners, he leaned forward to peck Jackie on the cheek farewell but she
jerked her head away and down so that the kiss fell awkwardly where her baseball cap
met her ear. In his seat at the rear of the helicopter he buckled into his safety
harness and the rotors began to whine but he couldn’t get the image of her unnecessary
rejection out of his mind, and as they lifted into the air he told himself of course
it was out of her control and slowly he forgave her.

On the flight across the Bay of Gonave the Chinook speared through the top of a squall,
bumping in and out of the storm’s cluster of cells, purple whirlwinds of rain opening
into brilliant white celestial amphitheaters of billowing cumulus, then slamming back
into the tempest, the rain shearing off into calm blue fields scrubbed with sunlight,
then shearing back into a dark whip of chaos, and when it was over Tom felt spiritually
alive and filled with gratitude. Then they descended to the infested wasteland that
was Gonaïves.

The three
blan
civilians disembarked, as did the police, and Tom walked across a soccer field sown
with broken glass and garbage to a line of vendors behind a chain-link fence. He bought
a Coca-Cola from an old woman squatting next to a filthy plastic bucket of melting
ice and a banana fritter from another woman just like her and stood with them in the
blistering sun and listened to the merchants’ scrape-bottom litany of proverbs and
misery and jokes while he waited for the ground crew to offload a palette of bottled
water and another of canned food and vegetable oil and meals ready to eat. A pair
of white pickup trucks arrived at the landing pad, their beds lined ten each with
Pakistani troops crammed together on wooden benches, and Tom watched them file onto
the ramp of the Chinook with their heavy rucksacks and their rifles, thinking they
seemed more geared up and professional than the typical Central Asian cannon fodder.
Finally the cargo chief waved him back and Tom strapped himself in and they waited
for the better part of an hour without any explanation and then took off.

At the airstrip in Cap-Haïtien, he was met by a Pakistani aide-de-camp who drove him
a few hundred yards to the UN bivouac where he sat down in the officers mess for an
early lunch of dahl and rice, fried cauliflower, and chicken with Colonel Khan, the
base commander for the northern district. The colonel’s briefing took Tom by surprise.
Now that the Americans had left, said Colonel Khan, he had been successful in his
attempt to coax Jacques Lecoeur out of the mountains for a negotiation. To negotiate
what? asked Tom.

What else is there to negotiate? said Khan. To lay down their arms and join the political
process, inshallah, said the colonel.

When was this? asked Tom.

One month ago.

And?

Mister Lecoeur agreed. But he has not turned in his weapons. He has not come out of
the wilderness.

Tom asked the colonel about the reports of people missing from the big families.

It’s difficult to know, said the colonel. Some are gang members, very slippery characters.
Some might have returned to the States or gone to the capital without telling anybody.
But you are here to solve the mystery, I am told. You are the expert, the one people
will talk to.

Not everyone.

You promise them what you can’t give them and they come to you like children.

What do I promise?

Justice.

What do
you
promise?

The wrath of God. The divine right of kings. And failing that, then order. Have you
ever been to Pakistan? the colonel asked.

No.

These people who can’t control themselves. In Pakistan, we know what to do with them.

I’ve heard that’s true. Such an orderly nation, Pakistan.

Good luck in the mountains, said the colonel, his gaze circling around the tent. Sorry,
where is your bodyguard? You’re not alone, are you? You should not go up there alone.

Tom explained that he never traveled with security personnel and the colonel said
he had been told that Tom had been assigned a bodyguard.

I don’t know who told you that, said Tom, but it’s wrong. I have a photographer and
a driver coming, that’s all.

Then the aide-de-camp took him into town and dropped him at the Christophe, where
he learned from Henri, the proprietor, that the hotel had been occupied for weeks
by international police monitors and UN consultants. Two rooms remained available
for tonight, but Henri would only guarantee one for tomorrow. Harrington told him
brightly,
We’ll make do
. He checked in and stowed his bag in the room with the larger bed and hired a driver
to take him to a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of the city where he met with
Père Dominique, a leftist French priest who had gone underground to escape assassination
during the de facto regime and had served as a contact for Jacques Lecoeur after the
Americans came ashore. Dominique made arrangements for Tom to meet a pair of Lecoeur’s
men where the road into the mountains ended, at the hamlet of Bois Caïman, and these
men would guide him to Lecoeur. In the midafternoon, he instructed the driver to take
him farther south into the countryside, to a sugar mill where he met with a representative
of the old families, who presented Tom with a computer disc that contained a file
on the missing persons. Then it was back to the Christophe for a much-anticipated
cocktail with Jackie but when he walked into the bar and saw her wave from a table
he could not even begin to comprehend why Gerard wasn’t by her side instead of Eville
Burnette, out of uniform, all smiles, saluting Tom with a bottle of beer.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In the morning he stripped off the rank clothes he had slept in and stepped into the
bathroom. The hot water was no hotter than the air and he chose the better option
and showered cold, trying to rethink Jacqueline Scott’s ambiguous relationship with
her camera, of no more substance than a hip ornament or stylish prop, he was sure,
until they were up in the mountains and had rendezvoused with a party of Lecoeur’s
men and everything went to hell. But any doubts he had back then about Jackie as a
photographer had been dispelled by something Conrad Dolan had revealed during last
night’s bar-stool confessions. Her interest in
vodou
had been genuine; she had documented the
houngans
and their ceremonies; her work had been good enough (or sensational enough) to merit
a gallery show in Tampa.

What, if anything, did this foretell, and did it at least mean she had mingled with
the
lwas
with enough sufficiency to have her soul restored? When Tom Harrington asked himself
that question, he was not serious. Jackie Scott, he thought, never had a soul to lose,
or had long ago lost sight of it, and she had drawn him into this dark vacancy of
hers with the irresistible skill of a succubus.

Refreshed and clearheaded, he toweled off and shaved, careful not to nick himself
and go home with hepatitis, then dressed in chinos and a T-shirt and went barefoot
down to breakfast, Joseph so happy to see him on the veranda that he threw his arms
around the American lawyer. Tom stiffened in the embrace as he looked beyond the waiter’s
shoulder at the table where a rumpled and chagrined Connie Dolan sat with Gerard,
who, from the conflicted look of shock and pleasure on his face, had not yet been
told Tom was in town.

I tell myself you will never come back, Gerard said in Kreyol, rising to his feet
as Joseph released Tom and Tom pressed Gerard to him briefly and stepped back and
Gerard lowered his voice to a mumble. The
foo
woman is dead, Tom.

They continued speaking in Kreyol. Yes, I know.

You have come back because of the woman, yes?

It is not my business, said Tom, his eyes avoiding Dolan’s, adding that he was, in
fact, leaving the island that afternoon, and inquired if Gerard was free to give him
a lift to the airport.

From the pained expression on Gerard’s rough face he understood the answer was no,
his services already procured by Dolan for a trip up the coast to the police station
in Saint-Marc. Dolan interrupted to ask Harrington to sit and have breakfast with
them but Tom ignored the invitation and Gerard told him that, like this white man
now at the table, Americans had come from Miami to speak with Gerard about the woman.

Yes, I know, said Tom. You told them that she and I went up into the mountains.

Yes, said Gerard. The Americans wanted to know about the north but I told them I was
in Port-au-Prince and could only say what I know from what the people say.

Bon,
said Tom. Gerard, tell me. What
didn’t
you tell the Americans?

Come on, Harrington, Dolan tried again. Let’s get past last night.

Slyly, Gerard smiled. He liked this question of Tom’s. Three things, he said. The
woman and man make a business with all the bad people, and the foreign people too.

That is what I’m finding out, said Tom.

Dolan no longer seemed interested in placating Tom. Stop acting like a jackass and
speak English and sit down, he said, which provoked an outburst from Tom, who spun
on his feet and took a hard step toward the table, teeth and fists clenched.

I want you to know something, Connie. This person I’m supposed to have killed. Damn
it, it was an accident.

It wasn’t an accident, my friend. It was nothing other than self-defense, said Dolan,
surrendering the irritation in his voice. You ran an ambush. I would have done the
same. He pulled a chair out from the table as a peace offering. Give me the chance
to tell you the rest of what you don’t know and then you can catch a flight out of
here, if that’s what you want. Gerard, you too, sit. Just speak English, for fuck’s
sake.

Joseph brought a fresh pot of coffee and took their orders and Tom listened to Dolan’s
encore performance, the bewildering and ultimately outlandish tale of what had happened
when he saw Jackie for the second time, months after his last encounter with Parmentier
and only several weeks before she was murdered. Dolan said he was at a steak house
in Ybor City with a prospective client, a local woman who had requested a meeting
over drinks and dinner. Her dime, so why not? A young woman dining alone in a booth
along the wall smiled boldly at him and fluttered her fingers hello. She was audacious
but beautiful and he thought here’s a paycheck to paycheck gal, après-office-secretary
overexerting herself when the rent’s due, because he didn’t recognize her, but she
was persistent and finally he stared at her long enough to realize it was Parmentier’s
wife, Renee Gardner—Jackie, although he never knew her as Jackie. Her hair was dyed
auburn and cut in a bob that revealed a dangle of sparkling earrings. She had put
on lipstick and her nails were painted candy-apple red and she wore a black cocktail
dress and high heels and flagged over a waiter to take a note she quickly scribbled
on a napkin. A minute later the note was in Dolan’s hands along with a fresh scotch
on the rocks courtesy of the lady.
Nice to see you again, Special Agent Dolan.
The woman who wanted to engage his services to discover how much her husband was really
worth took one bite of the pasta on her plate and stood up, saying she’d call him,
and left with an abruptness that you would be tempted to call premeditated. Dolan
rattled the ice in his glass, deliberating his cue to take the drink over to Jackie’s
table but she was already sliding into the chair across from him.

The lovely Mrs. Parmentier, he said. Why not just pick up the phone?

She looked demure and said she wasn’t good on the phone and surprise parties were
fun, weren’t they, less inhibiting anyway, and he tried to overlook the element of
flirtation in her voice and manner by being brusque and skeptical. In her present
incarnation, less salty voluptuousness and more the perfumed glamour of sophistication
and class, he had to keep reminding himself—it was like a commercial jingle looping
around in his skull—
This chick married a fuckhead.
Anything multiplied by zero equals zero.

How’s Jack?

Jack was on a business trip down south, she said, and after a long pause, waiting
for Dolan to say something, she told him she was worried about her husband.

Why, because he’s the light of your life?

That’s rude, she said but he could see the actress behind the pout, that she wasn’t
really insulted.

Dolan apologized, almost guilty for his instincts toward her. How’s the photography
going? he asked, but she didn’t want to change the subject and said that Parmentier
was in over his head down there and didn’t seem to know it, or didn’t seem to care,
and she suspected it was all going to end badly if something wasn’t done. It was not
a lament but a report, a briefing so shorn of tones of distress as to be almost scripted.

Down where? asked Dolan.

Okay, Special Agent Dolan. You’re going to bullshit me, right?

Retired, said Dolan. Call me Connie.

Well, Connie, Jack’s fucking over your people at the Bureau, did you know that?

How would I know that?

Parmentier liked to boast to her about the Tampa operation but she hadn’t believed
the stories until they went to Haiti together and there waiting for them was an emissary
from God and country, an absurdly pious disciple named Woodrow Singer, who would meet
them for Saturday lunch on the beach up the coast at a place called Moulin Sur Mer.
If Jack worked with the Bureau in Tampa, she told herself, then she shouldn’t be surprised
or alarmed that he was doing it in Haiti as well. Perhaps she should have been proud
of him, a private citizen and businessman answering the call of his government. Even
in the heat of the tropics Singer wore a coat and tie and linen shirts with a small
gold crucifix monogrammed on each cuff, never removed his aviator sunglasses, always
ordered boiled lobster and meticulously picked its shell, cleaned his hands with packaged
wipes before and after eating, always drank bottled water he had personally imported
from his home state of Utah, and inevitably made enthusiastic reference to the earthly
benefits of salvation by a higher power. Jackie would roll her eyes. Parmentier would
smile and nod agreeably and burp,
amen,
blasted on rum sours. At the end of these lunches it was understood she would go
for a swim and Singer would deliver to Parmentier a list of names, usually Near and
Middle Easterners, and the following week Parmentier would go to an art gallery in
Port-au-Prince owned by a Syrian and the Syrian would have photographs and basic information
about the men on the list and he and Parmentier would put together passports and visas
for the men and Singer probably expected that only the names on the list were given
new identities and documents.

The problem is, said Jackie, Jack’s been double-dipping on the paperwork, forging
documents for people who aren’t on the list, or forging an extra set with different
identities for some of the men who
are
on the list.

Huh, said Dolan, trying to understand why she was telling him these things.

That’s it?
Huh?

From the sound of things, Dolan suggested, she seemed rather involved in it all.

Honestly, no, she said. She kept her distance, she claimed, consumed by her own projects.
But sometimes he needed her to translate documents from Arabic, she said, so I know
more than I want to about what’s going on.

Arabic? He had forgotten Parmentier bragging about her proficiency with languages.
Why do you know Arabic?

Because I do.

And just what is it that’s going on? asked Dolan.

That’s why I’m talking to you. What’s going on, Connie?

The one thing I don’t understand, he said. You’re smart, beautiful, talented.

Blah blah blah.

What are you doing with a criminal like Jack Parmentier?

A criminal? she scoffed. He’s not so different than you. Why don’t you ask yourself
that question?

Dolan couldn’t bring her into focus. What’s your angle here, Renee? Money? Drugs?
Outlaw thrills? Sympathy for the devil? Was she one of those otherwise straightlaced
girls who sought out rogues as an avenue of rebellion against their demanding fathers?

I don’t care about drugs, she said dismissively, and he said, then that would explain
why it doesn’t bother you that your husband is a narcotrafficker. She smirked and
said if the government didn’t mind, why should she? And, anyway, how could she explain
herself or her motives let alone the unlikely passions of her heart to a mind as unimaginative
as Dolan’s. You are the product of a system, she told Dolan, and I am the product
of a vision.

Well, you’re right, honey, I ain’t Dostoyevsky, said Dolan, but I ain’t wrong, either.
You either have a predictable, and predictably dirty, reason for marrying this lowlife,
or you should think about visiting your mental health care provider because you’re
certifiably nuts.

Let’s stop, she said, fixing her eyes on Dolan. She needed him to be her friend and
ally, she needed his help. I want you to tell Parmentier to stop doing what he’s doing.
I mean with the Arabs.

You have a thing with Arabs?

Trust me, she said. Make Jack stop before he gets himself killed.

Really? said Dolan. Who’s going to kill him?

Who knows, she said dispassionately. People are lining up. Could be
moi,
she said with a flippant toss of her hair.

Dolan thought, with my blessings, sweetheart. He knew better than to guffaw, having
learned long ago the cold truth good citizens spent their lives denying, that the
right context could rip away every boundary of self-restraint from the most virtuous
person, but his eyes reflected bluff and she did not react well to his assessment
of her threat. Slipping off a shoe under the table, she suddenly jabbed him hard with
her stockinged heel, the quick stab of pain taking away the breath he had meant to
use to ask her—Why? But did it really matter why, because he knew if she was being
straight with him she was doomed, tomorrow, next month, next year, condemned already
and sentenced to death.

You’re taking me for granted, Agent Dolan.

Goddamn, he hissed. Don’t you think just leaving him is the better option here?

I’m serious, she said. And you fucking know it.

Conrad Dolan hadn’t been kicked square in the balls by a female since grade school.
He was furious and, inexplicably and ridiculously, smitten by the fantasy of roughhouse
sex with Parmentier’s overreaching wife. I’ll talk to him, he promised, but Renee
Gardner was dying on the side of a road in Haiti before he even thought about trying.

Tom Harrington had made himself into a listener, the most reliable asset of his personality,
there at the center of the self he believed in. Listening, he had come to understand,
was his vocation, his gift. Even as a child, raised like so many other children by
an unedited mother with too much to say and a father who practiced the mental golf
swings of inattention, Harrington determined that although not everybody felt the
need to talk, most people did, compelled to spill out their stories and opinions to
any audience within range but very few found value in the art of listening, least
of all to themselves, or found virtue in the discipline of concentrated silence. Harrington,
though, had successfully adapted, perhaps helped to create, the persona of a new genus
of roving therapist, a global receptor, circuit rider for the world’s unattended pain,
patient and respectful, habitually sincere, gently prompting yet diligent in his questioning.
The difference between his previous life as a correspondent and his life as an activist
began where the listening stopped.