The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (20 page)

He stared up the road, imagining the journey beyond Saint-Marc, out ahead into the
Artibonite, where mud men walked with hoes over their shoulders, imagining their sucking
steps across the rice paddies, then the eternally disquiet city of Gonaïves and the
massacre that had once occupied so much of his time and all of his passion, farther
north into the Savane Desolee and farther still into the
marronage
of the mountains, the bare-breasted women gathered along the blue-green rivers with
their wash baskets, and then the end of the road, Le Cap, where he had been reintroduced
to his lizard brain. Up there something essential had shifted in his moral universe
and the girl was not the cause of it but the invidious effect.

He looked up at the sky, at the towering clouds, and saw their magnificence.

Gerard asked if they wanted to stop at Moulin Sur Mer and Tom said he didn’t care
and Connie said,
On the way back
. Tom revisited his inventory of questions.

This report you enjoy holding over my head. Who wrote that report? Was it a military
sit-rep? Something about the people I had gone up there to investigate? A person named
Jacques Lecoeur?

Yes and no, said Dolan. A situation report on file in the defense attaché’s office
at the embassy.

Who wrote it? Sergeant Burnette?

The name was redacted.

Eville Burnette brought Jackie to me up north. Gerard was supposed to do it but Burnette
did it. Did you know that?

No.

I didn’t want him along, but he came with us up into the mountains to contact Lecoeur.
Did you know that?

I didn’t know it was him.

Tell me what was in the sit-rep. No dicking around.

The first half was you and the girl. The last half was about a UN operation to clean
out this warlord Lecoeur and his gang. I take it they sent in a team of Pakistani
commandos after you left.

I was still there.

Mission accomplished, from what I gathered. There was an addendum. Some raid or takedown
of the cops up there last month, about the time of the girl’s death.

With American soldiers? That couldn’t be true. Gerard, is this true?

People say this is true, said Gerard.

My God. There’s another wad of good intentions you can shove right up my ass.

But they were thugs, right? Criminals. Bad guys.

Who? Which ones? Jesus, I don’t even know anymore. Goddamn it.

Used and abused. Go ahead and have a good cry.

What’s it say about the girl? Was she in on it?

It doesn’t say. Did you do the trach? It wasn’t you, was it?

No, it was Burnette, Tom said.

And then they medevac out of there leaving you to the wolves and that’s what I’ve
never understood.

Yeah, what?

Why you didn’t get on the chopper. Why you stayed behind.

I don’t know myself anymore.

Well it sounds like quite a party.

You don’t know the half of it,
thought Tom. I’m rethinking everything about the north, said Tom. That it’s very possible—
very
possible—that whoever survived this massive motherfucking betrayal that I seem to
be responsible for tracked her down when they discovered she was back on the island.
The only thing that seems to work in Haiti is retribution.

Good hunch, slim chance, said Dolan. From what I understand, they’re all dead or long
gone over the border. Number two, all that time afterward when she was running around
snapping pictures of witch doctors, why didn’t they take care of it then? And when
she came back she didn’t come back as Jackie, she came as Renee, new look, new identity.

Someone could have found her out.

Tom, said Gerard. They are not all dead. I think you will be very surprised.

What do you mean?

The man who fought with the woman. His name is Ti Phillipe.

He’s alive?

Now? Maybe. He was the commander of the police in Cap-Haïtien but he ran away.

Explain that to me. How could that have happened?

The palace was very angry with the foreign soldiers for going into the mountains to
kill Jacques Lecoeur and the palace make the soldiers give back Ti Phillipe and make
Ti Phillipe
chef
of Le Cap.

Then, as Gerard explained it, the story became incontrovertibly Haitian. Ti Phillipe
quarreled with the United Nations mission in Cap-Haïtien, the men on his force shot
and wounded several Pakistani blue caps on patrol, the incident was repeated a few
days later with deadly force returned against the police, order was not only restored
but reinvented when Colonel Kahn called a truce and advised Ti Phillipe to find other,
more profitable ways to make trouble than shooting it up with his conscripts. Before
long, Ti Phillipe, with a newfound gusto for corruption and illegal activity, was
quarreling not with Colonel Khan but with the palace, which did not appreciate the
unlawful expansion of Ti Phillipe’s authority or the equally unlawful increase of
his wealth. The United Nations mission was dismantled on schedule and the president’s
quarrel with Ti Phillipe escalated into the bitter irreconcilable realm of the ideological,
the result being an unlikely poisonous alliance between the erstwhile guerilla, the
bourgeoisie, and the
Armée Rouge
.

Okay, said Connie Dolan. My supposition is our man here was too busy with his manifest
disloyalties to waste time whacking the girl. And from what I gather from the addendum
on that report, the palace took him down.

Tom asked Gerard if he knew of any business Parmentier and the girl had conducted
up north and Gerard said he didn’t know but it was possible. Something else is going
on here but I don’t know how it connects with Jackie, said Tom.

You mean the Arabs? asked Dolan.

No, said Tom. I mean the US military.

Tom, said Gerard. The people say the Americans train Ti Phillipe how to make coup
d’état.

All of the wisdom he could muster about the relationship between the United States
and Haiti, and countries destroyed enough to be anything like Haiti, told him this
rumor would prove out, this information was true. And indispensable to the truth of
it, inseparable from the truth of it, in Harrington’s mind anyway, would be one man,
the elite and unanticipated common denominator, the connective tissue, Master Sergeant
Eville Burnette, the Special Forces commando who didn’t go away when he was supposed
to go away.
Why didn’t you get on the C-130 back to Bragg, Ev? Why aren’t you sitting in some
titty bar in Fayetteville drinking off the unnecessary failures and calculated shortfalls
of the mission? What are you doing here with us in Le Cap? This is deeply, badly fucked
and I don’t need a babysitter and you need to disappear.
But Burnette had told Harrington to get used to the idea of his company because he
wasn’t going anywhere, his command had pulled him off the plane at the last second
and ordered him into civvies and took him across the airfield to the UN HQ and hooked
him up with the girl.
You’re doing something that people seem to think is very interesting,
he told Tom
,
who wanted to know what people, and Eville said,
Above my pay grade, man.
The UN requested the temporary loan of his sad ass from JSOC, and here he was.
Bullshit,
said Tom,
this is a fucking vanity mission. You SF hotshots have spent a year and a half trying
to track down Lecoeur and all you’ve come up with are the banana leaves he used to
wipe his ass. I don’t want you along,
but
Burnette suggested that Harrington had little choice in the matter.

Of course I have the choice. What I’m doing is not in any way your concern.

The only choice you have is to not go into the mountains. Is that your choice?

They’re going to know who you are. It’ll take Lecoeur five seconds to figure you out.

I’m a reporter from AMI,
he said, flashing UN-issued press credentials.
It isn’t your decision and it isn’t mine. You either take me, or you don’t take me
and I follow you in another vehicle, or you stay here and we get drunk and tell stories
and you don’t go.

Why is this such a big deal?
Jackie had asked Tom and he told her,
Just shut up,
and she left the table in the Christophe’s dining area and went to her room and Eville
Burnette walked off into the night but he was back in the morning for breakfast, leaning
against the SUV in the car park at sunrise in his lightweight boots and acid-wash
jeans and beige journo’s vest and Oakley sunglasses and he didn’t quite look like
a soldier and he didn’t much look like a correspondent but he surely did resemble
some ranch-hand version of muscle-bound sneaky-Pete spook and there was nothing Tom
could do about it and he had already forgotten why he had agreed to such a worthless
and foolish affair, a waste of time and, finally, a waste of life.

He watched Gerard eat up the miles to Saint-Marc and rolled Eville Burnette’s name
around in his mind, the slide and tick of the syllables like an incomplete access
code to a vast encryption, guessing that Eville was probably up there in the mountains
now, counting jumping jacks with Ti Phillipe and his rogue police force, and maybe
he had been in-country when Jackie was killed, and maybe that would be no coincidence,
and maybe this, and maybe that, and maybe nothing, but Eville Burnette had been with
Jackie at Bòkò St. Jean’s for some ceremony of no little importance the day before
she died. Eville Burnette, Eville Burnette. Eville and Jackie
. . .
sitting in a tree? Was that the code? Doing what, for Christ’s sake? Sacrificing bulls?
Bobbing for wayward souls? Come on, man.

They were deep in the muddle of the center of the city now and Dolan had rolled up
his window to shield himself from the
marchands
running up to the vehicle and Gerard began to turn right to connect with the street
that would, in a few blocks, lead them to the station but Tom told him in Kreyol to
keep straight and take them to the
hounfour
on the outskirts of town.

We’ll come back, Tom explained to Connie.

From where? asked Dolan.

Why do you think Woodrow Singer wanted to speak to me in private?

Unless he wanted you to kneel and pray with him, I don’t have a clue.

Mr. Singer knows more than you give him credit for. For instance, he seems to know
that I brought Jackie up here to Saint-Marc. For instance, he told me who he thinks
killed the girl. What I want to know is why he didn’t check it out himself.

Everybody but Parmentier killed the girl—that would be Woody’s point of view. Who
does he think killed the girl?

The devil.

That’s fucking great. The devil.

He was serious.

If he’s serious, then you know why he didn’t check it out. In the House of Hoover,
he is what we call not field-oriented. Woodrow Singer wouldn’t be caught dead sitting
next to a bar whore in Okinawa or taking a statement from a Hindu. Woodrow Singer
loves his desk and his computer and loves Jesus and hates dirty people and dirty foreign
countries and hates sinners and loves the unborn and the twice born. He puts on latex
gloves just to take out the trash. Singer is a sidestepper and a buck-passer. Now
why don’t you tell me what you’re talking about? Who’s the Devil of the Month? Why
are you in this car instead of on a plane back to the States?

I don’t know who killed Jackie or why, but I think now I know who does.

Good. Let’s have it.

We’re going to pay a visit to a voodoo priest, said Tom.

Oh, brother, said Connie Dolan. This ought to be good.

Clambering up the chalky bankside from the road, Harrington began to think of Conrad
Dolan as neither colleague nor rival nor the man in charge but as a nuisance, in the
way and out of tune, his role reversed and reduced to that of a spectator in this
encore performance of the Tom and Jackie show, his vision of the truth bent cross-eyed
by an excess of motives and dubious intentions.

Then they were atop the plateau wiping the sweat trickling down their brows and staring
back into the frightened eyes of the Haitian peasant who had popped up from his seat,
a rusty metal folding chair in the shade of an avocado tree to the side of the
hounfour,
the rifle at his waist trained on them, not an effective way to aim a gun unless
it was a shotgun, which it was, and double-barreled; there’s yours, here’s mine. Dolan
instinctively stepped sideways so they could not both be taken down with one blast
and the Kreyol rushed forth in a stumble out of Tom’s mouth and the tilt of the guard’s
head seemed to imply no matter what he was hearing he could not understand it and
when he didn’t respond and didn’t lower the gun Tom called back down to the road for
Gerard to come quick, and Gerard came right up and went unsmiling to the peasant with
his arm extended and made the man shake his hand, saying
What is the problem, these men are friends of Bòkò St. Jean and wish to say hello.

Big problems,
said the peasant with the shotgun. His voice was soft and high and sweet, like a
girl’s, and despite the gun he seemed otherwise docile and unintimidating.

Gerard, said Dolan, tell this gentleman to stop pointing his weapon at me or I’m going
to take it from him and insert it backward up his ass.

Big, big problems,
said the peasant.
Please, go away.

Let’s move back and let Gerard talk to him, said Tom. Gerard, what does this man have
to tell us?

The __________is not welcome here,
he heard the peasant tell Gerard.

The what? said Tom. Who’s not welcome? I couldn’t understand the word.

The bishop, said Gerard. The bishop is not welcome.

Tell him we don’t have any association with the bishop and just want to give the
houngan
some money and make an offering to the
lwas
.