The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (19 page)

What’s going on with you and Sergeant Burnette? he asked impatiently.

What do you mean what’s going on? I’ve been here for what, a week? I’ve known him
for like twenty-four hours. What are you trying to say? That we cooked up a scheme
to ruin your day? Wow, that’s a fucked-up question. Fuck you, Tom.

You weren’t taking pictures for him for some reason?

Fuck you, Tom. She sang it like the chorus to a jolly song. Fuck you, Tom.

He felt himself on the brink of shouting at her, making clear the damage she and Burnette
had done, interfering with serious matters, and their actions had placed him in the
unthinkable position of being the driver of a car that had hit a man and sped away.
But he did not want to tell Jackie this last piece of information, he did not want
to hear himself say it out loud. The rum and the wing-tip brush of ganja had dizzied
him and the dizziness lay spread like oil on the greater pool of his fatigue and the
heat had begun to feel like a fever. His confusion about Jackie made him oddly fragile
and not altogether rational and he did not want to spend this night in such close
quarters with her chaperoned by his anger. Because she appeared to be telling the
truth he wanted to comfort her but the impulse felt too close to desire and unmanageable
and so he rewarded her instead.

I have your camera, he said, reaching down for his day pack.

Oh, my God! she said. Oh, my God! She came flying off the bed and in her excitement
said I love you and kissed him not passionately but a moment longer than she might
have, her eyes searching for his reaction as she pulled back, glancing down at his
lap and quickly back up. Sorry, she laughed, taking the camera. Thank you, thank you,
how the fuck did you get it, I thought I’d never see it again. Her happy steps bounced
back to the bed where she plopped on her back with her arms out wide, the camera in
one hand, as if in a swoon to the sudden wonderfulness of life. Here we are, she half-sang
in a familiar melody he failed to identify, and ever shall be in our memories.

Tom slumped, dumbstruck, in his chair.

Fuck fuck fuck! She examined the frame counter and popped open the back of the Nikon.
They took the film.

Right, Tom said woodenly. They yanked it.

No! she wailed again like a child. We have to go back for another shoot.

You’ve lost your mind.

No, really, stop kidding. Let’s go back tomorrow. Are you going back?

I’m never going back.

No, no, no, Tom. Bad Tom. She left the camera on the bed and crossed the room, humming
the tune he could not name, placing a hand on each arm of the chair to capture him,
leaning over, her nose inches from his and her eyes puffy and blinking, unable to
sustain their focus. Bad Tom, she whispered, and repeated it silently to make him
read her lips.

You are so stoned, he said. Way out there.

He did not try to stop her from climbing into the chair, sitting crossways on his
lap, her long bare legs draped over the armrest and her right hand sliding up the
sensitive nape of his neck into his hair, the gentle kneading switching on and off
to a rough caress, a clumsy attempt at sensuality. Her mouth was slack, her lips parted
too much, and he held the drift of her gaze long enough to see that her eyes were
empty of desire, and he did not know what he was seeing except the parody of a vixen
and the suggestion of a shared knowledge that might allow them to slip effortlessly
forward into the role of lovers or send them simultaneously blazing off in opposite
directions.

Bad Tom, she said again. Let’s go back. Please, please, and she squeezed a fistful
of his hair to punctuate herself.

He told himself she was out of her mind and now so was he, Jackie there again in his
lap, the stick of skin against skin, her crotch atop his, the boundaries that seduction
took such exquisite art in dismantling cast aside from the moment he had opened the
door. He dropped his eyes to her breasts and she allowed this, her fingers curling
along his scalp, and Tom became acutely aware of his hands and what he might do with
them—unless he raised them in the air there was nowhere for them to go but on her
body—the right hand in a tentative pause on her closest knee, the left hand clasped
on her rib cage below her left breast, and he stopped looking at her breasts and watched
his right hand turn so that the shelf of his fingers was snug between her closed knees,
her own hand in his hair, squeezing harder, her nails pressing painfully into his
scalp as his hand took its time traveling from her knees up her slick thighs and stopped
without touching her panties. He moved his hand then infinitesimally closer yet not
all the way and she gasped and in the sublime and terrible tension of the moment he
looked into her eyes and saw them become empty and although she did not stop him he
knew something had changed and something was wrong and he stopped himself, withdrawing
his hand.

Jackie, I need you to get up, he said, and she got up awkwardly and stood before him
with skittish eyes in a confusing posture of submissiveness, telegraphing both a strange
challenge and imminent surrender. I need to use the bathroom, he explained, getting
up himself.

He stayed in the darkness of the bathroom a long time, too long, a deep dull ache
in his balls, wondering what to do, and when he started to fall asleep perched on
the toilet he went back out. The candle was sputtering in a puddle of wax on the nightstand
and she lay on the top sheet, naked again, on one side of the bed with her eyes closed
and her hands cupped protectively at the top of her legs. He would not get into the
bed with her and returned to the upholstered chair and slouched onto its cushion,
finding its comfort incomplete, his body unappeased. When he looked back at her again
her eyes were open, lambent, watching.

Why are you over there? she asked.

I’m not sure.

He made himself stop thinking about it and came to the empty side of the bed and lay
down and wrapped his arms over his head, careful not to touch her but disabled by
the citric smell of her sweaty body. She asked if he wanted her to blow out the candle
and he did and then they were in darkness. Listening to her breathing he could barely
draw a breath himself.

After a while she said, What were you doing in there so long? and her voice was strained
and reedy and not beckoning, she was not being playful or teasing but mocking the
desire she must know he could not silence forever.

Nothing. Sitting.

Were you thinking of me?

He turned on his side facing her, the dense but indistinct shape of her, and wondered
if he was imagining this, the impression that she was touching herself while she talked
with him. I’m too tired to think.

You were thinking about fucking me, weren’t you?

The crassness of her mood jarred him but still he replied as if she were joking, wanting
her to stop being weird.

Maybe. You got a problem with that? he asked, trying to sound lighthearted, but she
didn’t answer.

For several minutes they lay quietly in the rippling hush of the darkness, Tom trying
to determine if her breath actually quickened as he imagined it, trying to decide
if it would be all right if he reached over to put his hand on her shoulder or pet
her cheek. He was telling himself how could it not be all right when she spoke again.

What’s your daughter’s name?

How do you know I have a daughter?

You told me, she said, but he could not remember ever mentioning such a thing.

Her name is Allison. Why are we talking about her?

How old is she?

Eleven. Let’s stop there.

She made a thoughtful sound and whispered, That’s the age, isn’t it?

Age for what?

When they become luscious. When they start resisting.

Resisting what?

You.

Yeah, he said, misunderstanding her implication, she’s getting around to that.

How old was she when you first finger fucked her?

What the hell are you talking about? He bolted upright. That’s fucking sick.

The bedsprings creaked again as she changed positions, turning on her stomach, her
answer muffled by the pillow.

What? Tom said, leaning closer.

Have you ever fucked her?

What?

You’ve wanted to fuck her, right?

What galaxy are you from?

You’ve thought about it, haven’t you? Is your dick hard?

What do you think? You’re getting off on this, aren’t you?

Then in the darkness her hand reached over to his face and then his mouth, clutching,
pushing, the pissy scent of her fingertips flooding his nostrils and he moved and
straddled her and unbuttoned his shorts and underneath him felt the power contained
by her body and its exquisite summoning as he pressed himself between her legs where
her other hand, underneath her, blocked his entrance. He pressed harder, tried to
pry an opening with his cock but she filled herself with her fingers and he heard
her say something and Tom said
What?
unsure if she had said
Don’t. Stop.
or
Don’t stop,
and so went higher, pressing himself beyond the halo of tightness into her anus and
he heard the sharp intake of her breath and the root of a sound she made behind the
grit of her teeth. When he blinked his eyes stung with his sweat and after several
thrusts she said to the pillow,
Get off,
or maybe,
Get off me,
and after an uncertain pause and then several more strokes he was shuddering and
done and off her, gulping the air like water and as he fell to his side of the bed
for an instant he no longer knew who he was and the day had become a death that crushed
him under its weight and left him, for seconds or minutes or an eternity, in an insensate
afterlife, his body so heavy it hurtled away through black space and all that remained
was the disconnected awareness of a world from which he had been evicted.

In the morning he woke to a sour residue of grimness in the room and saw that she
was gone.
Thanks for the lecture on permission,
Jackie had scrawled on a page in the notebook she had removed from his day pack
. Now you know what kind of a man you are.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Cui bono?
—the question he was peppered with by his professors at law school.
Who benefits?
The line of inquiry would, on occasion, arc and plunge away from the perpetrator
of an act and burrow itself into a labyrinth of concealed interests, which may or
may not deliver up the wizard, the ultimate and unexpected source. Was Conrad Dolan
the wizard, Tom Harrington asked himself, or was he simply a man in the difficult
position of having to save himself by letting go of the rope he had thrown to save
another? Or was the rope itself a subterfuge?

No matter how he looked at his increasingly unsavory relationship with Dolan, he could
find no like-mindedness and thus no common purpose between the lies he told himself
and the falsehoods and manipulations manufactured by Dolan, a man who circumambulated
the truth like a Buddhist monk speaking in riddles and koans. Stories truly told are
true, except when they are not. Harrington felt duped and duped again, and this journey
north to Saint-Marc must, he told himself, be the end of the game, forfeit as acceptable
an outcome as any other.

Silent and brooding, he sat in the back of the SUV with his face in the wind to avoid
the church-lady odor of Connie’s aftershave and chain-smoked from a pack of Comme
Il Fauts
and looked out the open window at the slums between the road and the harbor, the rubble-spread
of shantytowns resembling landfills or refuse dumps inhabited by bent-over crews
of scavengers, pigs rooting through the sulfurous heaps of garbage. What had Jackie
said when they had driven past these abominations?—
You’d never see that in a Muslim country.
Pigs in the streets.
It would cause a riot.
In the front seat, Conrad Dolan scowled out the window at the city passing by in a
haze of filth and the increasingly open violence of its population and waited for
Harrington to tell him what Woodrow Singer had said to change his mind. Then they
were well beyond the congestion of the capital, on Route Nationale One, and encouraged
by the change of season evident in the countryside, the oven-hot air suffused with
an aromatic elixir wafting from the flowering trees that lined the road and the vendors
camped in their shade, selling watermelons and tomatoes. Tom felt the nostalgic sense
of freedom he had always experienced, escaping Port-au-Prince. Now it seemed his thoughts
were organized, questions clipped together like rounds of ammunition in a magazine.
He poked Dolan on the shoulder to make him turn around.

Why am I here?

You tell me. I thought you had a plane to catch.

No. Why did you bring me with you to Haiti?

I’m not going to bullshit you, said Dolan. I was hoping you could bulletproof me.
Tom knew the place, he knew the girl, he had investigative chops. If Harrington could
not prove Jack Parmentier had murdered his wife, chances were nobody could. But you’ve
already worked this out, Tom, Connie said. I’m not telling you what you don’t know.

Who’s Albert Neff?

You know that son of a bitch? Jesus Christ.

He was at the embassy yesterday. He didn’t talk with you?

The only place Mr. Neff wants to converse with me is in front of a grand jury, under
oath. The unfortunate thing about family quarrels, Dolan explained, was their unintended
consequence, another type of collateral damage, tripping over deceptions and secrets
that no one ever intended to expose and all parties suffering from a distinct feeling
of ambush and collision. While the Bureau wanted Parmentier to just go away, Justice
was determined to use him as a broom to sweep out the dirt of a disorderly house.
You’re a smart man, Tom. Nobody but Albert Neff wants to see Parmentier plea-bargain
his way out of the hole he dug himself.

Tell me what you believe.

Dolan glanced over at Gerard behind the wheel as if to measure the importance of his
existence. There would be a precedent, he finally said. My guy has some history.

That would be what Parmentier has on you.

Between you and me and the mermaids in the sea, said Dolan. You know who my hero was,
the guy I hoped to emulate, the guy I wanted to be? Bobby Kennedy. The way he went
after the mob. But during the Tampa operation, Dolan had received a call late one
night from Parmentier, who said he was down on his boat and had a problem. You can
guess this problem. This problem doesn’t take a genius.

Someone figured out what Parmentier was up to.

And that was that.

That was that. Jack invites this guy down to the boat to talk things over and ends
up beating him to death. If you ask me, said Dolan, he did the world a favor, but
that would be a technicality. Two wrongs can, in fact, make a right but that’s worth
one complimentary glass of iced tea in hell, right? So the dumb shit calls me and
wants me to come down there and help him dump the body in the bay because he doesn’t
know how to drive his own fucking boat!
Are you out of your fucking mind,
Dolan said, and hung up.

But the pattern Connie expected him to see was not visible to Tom—Parmentier had let
Jackie in, he let her come close, he let her see everything. Then she goes to you
complaining about Arabs. I don’t get that.

Yeah, I don’t know, said Dolan.

Who did you talk to at the embassy yesterday? The DCM?

Yeah. I said I don’t know why you want to make my job hard but just make this one
thing easy, will you? Let me talk to the staffer who showed up at the scene the night
of the murder. No can do, says the DCM. The man’s been reassigned. Fine, I say, tell
me his name, position, place of reassignment. Brussels, military liaison, but I’m
not going to be the one who tells you his name, says the DCM. Turns out the woman
he was escorting to Moulin Sur Mer for the weekend was not his wife, and the DCM promised
to keep his name out of the investigation. Let me talk to her then, I say. He says
he can’t do that, either, because the woman is the wife of some other person on the
staff who thought she was away feeding the poor or something like that. I’ve talked
to her myself, says the DCM, she never got out of the car that night. All right, I
say, I want to see the report this guy wrote up when he got back to town. Have it
right here, says the DCM. The bastard wasn’t going to give it to me unless I asked.

And?

And nothing. I could have written it myself.

What did you do yesterday afternoon?

Listen, it’s not in my interest for Woodrow Singer to know my business, said Dolan.
He went to a downtown gallery to see the Syrian, an entrepreneur with a curious disregard
for his property, a colonial-era warehouse with puddles of water on the untiled concrete
floor, mold on the flaking walls, canvases stacked everywhere in disarray. He sold
me a painting, said Dolan. You can have it, take it home for your wife. I don’t want
that crap in my house.

The Syrian did not bother to forget the friendly American who came to the gallery
often to use the copying machine. Oh, yeah? Dolan said. What the fuck did he have
to copy so much? The Syrian says business documents. Dolan said, Yeah? Did these documents
look like US drivers’ licenses for guys named Mohammed and Ali Baba and he smiled
and told Dolan a long story about how his people had fled the Levant in the twenties
and came to Haiti and lived happily ever after among the blacks, who produced a more
amenable class of dictator than the Arabs. He wanted Dolan to know how much he loved
Americans too. Working with the Americans was a family tradition. He said his father
and uncles used to sell pot pies and lemonade or something to the marines who were
down here shoveling out the muck in the thirties.

You’re saying he gave you nothing.

He inclined his head toward Tom and smiled indulgently. Maybe if I put a gun to his
head.

But at the Oloffson, after Tom had slipped off to his room, Woodrow Singer had come
back to the table to soft-sell Dolan on the Arabs. He said it was, quote, an OGA operation
with a little fraternal boost from some people at Defense.

I don’t know OGA, said Tom Harrington. What’s OGA?

Other Government Agency. You ready to puke yet? A Washington euphemism beloved among
the intelligence community. It almost always means shut up, don’t ask. You can take
it from there.

Dolan continued with Singer’s explanation of the operation, people taking care of
a diaspora of indebtedness, promises made but not kept, loyalties never repaid—abandoned
cadres left behind in northern Iraq during the Gulf war, exiles from the Taliban,
opium smugglers, mujahideen manques. The imperium’s tribal proxies morphed into a
culled and select clientele, resurrected and reinvented on the basis of a nefarious
range of criteria. Singer had told Dolan the Bureau’s involvement amounted to a courtesy,
much like running an off-the-books witness protection program for people whom various
agencies couldn’t seem to expedite through the system.

Kurds and Afghanis are not Arabs, said Harrington. You said Jackie was translating
paperwork from Arabic.

Dolan said that he had to assume that Arabs were in the mix but that something had
gone awry with the operational process. That’s the sense I get, he said, and that’s
what Renee Gardner went out of her way to tell me. It had become apparent to Conrad
Dolan that Parmentier and the Syrian were both assets, but whose? That they doubled
up on the forgeries meant a trap door had been installed into the protocol, but why?
What it all added up to, Dolan wasn’t prepared to say. But my instinct tells me we
should be looking elsewhere, said Connie, and that’s why I want to talk with these
cops up there in Saint-Marc. They were on the scene. Nobody else I can find was on
the scene. So here we are, or rather here I am. Are you going to tell me now why you
changed your mind?

You’re saying Parmentier was—? He stopped himself because he always felt like an idiot
mouthing the acronym, and his glancing experience with the men and women of the Agency
left him with the impression of their incapacity to express themselves beyond the
raw vernacular of cowboytalk or the chant of dataspeak or the glassy-eyed prophecy
of Christian millennialism. In his experience, they were anti-intellectuals—civilization’s
drones. He had seen them—handlers or case officers or field agents, whatever they
were called—at their hangout, what was commonly known among the expatriates as the
spook bar in Petionville. They were never furtive or discreet or genteel; they were,
instead, simply smug, mundane personalities attached to a grand adventure or perhaps
only a tawdry escapade, and ultimately self-important and tiresome.

Working with, for, under, alongside—fuck, I don’t know, said Dolan. Singer claims
him, that’s what I know. But so does the DEA. Our Jack was busy. Jack was much in
demand, given his expertise. Jack was industrious. From what I gather, the DEA set
him up as a drug lord so he could squeal on the other drug lords. The margin for error
there is as wide as the River Nile. Look, Harrington, Jack was running a hatchery
for enemies down here, not to mention the old ones back in the States with long memories.
My guess is the contract was meant for him. They missed him, got her. If my best guess
is wrong, then Jack is where he belongs, behind bars in Miami, and my own day of reckoning
is on the horizon. How much farther is this fucking place?

On their left, between the road and the Bay of Gonave, lay the thorny wasteland of
Tintayen, a bone field for the ancien régime, and three years before Harrington had
spent a nauseating week scouring its desecrated ground with an Argentinian forensics
team, cataloging the bleached remains, corpses devoured by land crabs and swamp rats
and feral dogs. Somewhere in a box he kept in his Miami office there was a file.

On the inland side they began to pass a ramble of blistered foothills, and visible
ahead an eroding stack of parched mountains seemed to nose into the sea. Tom Harrington
told Dolan they were coming up to the quarry and asked if he wanted to stop and Connie
said sure and they slammed along through the potholes until Gerard pulled over.

They stepped out into the swelter of an amphitheater cut into the mountain’s flank,
the dusty mineral scent of crushed rock and the blood-iron pungency of the opened
earth. The sun like a dentist’s lamp in their eyes. More than anything, the living
weight of silence bracketed up and down the road by greasy waves of mirage.

These were the boulders Parmentier would have hidden behind, they guessed, staring
into the quarry, and then they walked across the baked surface of the road to the
drop of the opposite shoulder and stared down at the coarse earth and its shrivel
of weeds and brush and turned a circle to let their eyes sweep the pavement and then
looked out at the shimmer of the distant sea. Dolan squatted down to pluck a diamond
of broken glass from the pimpled tar and turned it over in his fingers before throwing
it away.

Why here? Dolan squinted up and down the empty highway and looked at Tom. You know
the road. What do you think?

I haven’t thought about it before. Standing here now, it’s obvious, isn’t it?

Yeah. I guess so. Sorry to say.

The land behind was wide open all the way back to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.
About a mile or two farther north the ecology changed and there was a stretch of villages
up the coast to Moulin Sur Mer. Between the villages and the capital, said Tom, there’s
no place like this.

You can run to the quarry and take cover.

Or walk to the quarry and wait.

Yeah. Let’s go.

Something in the rigidity of Conrad Dolan’s face and movement as he turned back to
the car made Harrington pause and he gazed down at the various patches of stain on
the surface of the road—incredible to think that what was in you would one day burst
out and evaporate or sink—darkened blots of oil or maybe an indelible residue of
old sun-broiled blood or maybe nothing, waiting to feel the one thing he had felt
most strongly in Haiti, what he had trained himself to feel, the faint or intense
but always unmistakable presence of death, but there was nothing there for him, only
his cold heart stalled on a precipice of feeling, but then as he surveyed the unloving
desolation of the landscape that had absorbed the last moments of her life his stomach
wrenched against a bloom of nausea and, for the first time since learning of Jackie’s
murder, he experienced the stabbing power of loss. Death had made him ravenous for
life—it was imperative he keep moving, seeing things, feeling things—and into that
hunger had walked Jackie and she had enraged him and inflamed him with the fullness
of living even as she imperiled his soul.