The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (3 page)

But Dolan could have been anybody; he was different, not because he blended in—he
didn’t—but because, Tom quickly learned, he shared Harrington’s preference to look
at the world through the eyes of a foot soldier or a cop on the beat, from the ground
up. Most of all he loved to talk, his
head an archive of stakeouts and busts running back to the glory days of J.
Edgar Hoover, and he was enamored by the mystery of personality enough to preserve
it from his obligation to rip and dilute and defeat that mystery into paperwork. On
the island Dolan would tell Harrington the most difficult type of suspect to interrogate
is a raconteur: you ask him his name and never get in a follow-up question. You hear
a lot but you never really find out anything. And Tom had thought ungenerously,
Dolan is talking about Dolan
.

When I was supervisor of the Bureau’s office in San Juan, Dolan said as they checked
in for their flight, the only whites in a queue of Haitians, we had a saying, it was
like our motto: There are only two types of Americans in the Caribbean, those who
are
wanted . . .

Yeah?

. . .
and those who are
not
wanted.

As they walked down the ramp and stood in a second queue waiting to board, Dolan leaned
in to Tom to tell a story. The hotel in this airport, I made my last collar here before
I retired from the Bureau, he began, lowering his voice. The guy was huge, six foot
six, a serial killer, twenty-three victims. A tip came in about two o’clock in the
morning that he was staying here, I got a backup from the Miami police force, and
we came on over, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and there he is, in the hall
with this little white guy. I identified myself and said, You’re under arrest, and
he goes like this—Dolan’s right hand reached for his left side. He was wearing a sport
coat and I said to myself,
Just show me a peek of that gun and I’ll blow you away, you son of a bitch,
but he didn’t have a gun on him, it was all reflex, muscle memory, he was drunk and
acted instinctively. So we handcuffed the two of them and walked them outside and
put them in the car and I told this Miami cop, Fuck, that guy’s lucky, I almost shot
him, and the cop says, I was waiting for you to whack him and I was going to take
out the witness. The little guy, we find out, is just some good samaritan cabdriver
helping a drunk customer to his room.

Dolan’s snapshots from the everyday battle of good and evil were entertaining, but
Harrington didn’t know what to say. You married, Mr. Dolan?

Connie.

Connie?

Yeah. Married twenty-nine years. Three kids, all grown. You?

Yes. A daughter in middle school.

Their seats were not together on the plane. At one point during the flight Connie
Dolan unbuckled himself and Tom watched him move down the aisle toward him, not light
on his feet but energetic and savvy, nodding gregariously at passengers who met his
avuncular blue-eyed smile, pausing to exchange words with an older woman dressed in
her Sunday finery, not uncomfortable to be a white man in a world turned suddenly
black and, by any account except Haiti’s, exceedingly foreign. Even the African American
community in Miami looked upon the Haitians as indecipherable hicks. Stopping at Tom’s
row, Dolan combusted once more into storytelling, a Cold War tale of a morning spent
in farcical surveillance of a Soviet sleeper cell in West Virginia, two agents lost
on the highway, missing their exit, turning around, missing it again. Then Dolan asked
about the byzantine power struggles on the island and Tom could sense tension in the
men beside him, his two seatmates in the row, and although his reply was polite it
was not illuminating. This was a matter not to be discussed in front of strangers,
and Tom was wearied by the subject. Each time he left the island he would tell himself
the situation there couldn’t possibly get worse. Each time he returned, things were
worse. Haiti was postfunctional, a free-range concentration camp, and Tom had abandoned
faith in the country’s ability to save itself. Haiti couldn’t find its bottom.

Dolan wanted Tom to teach him how to greet a person in Kreyol.

Como yé?
How are you, how’s it going? They’ll answer,
Na’p boulé
. We’re boiling, we’re on fire.

On the ground, inundated by the mundane details of arrival, Tom felt grateful for
Dolan’s composure, his affable patience with inefficient procedure, and saw for himself
that Dolan was a man who glided easily into the muddle. They shouldered their bags
through customs and, outside in the steam bath, pressed themselves into the scrum
of need that surrounded the terminal, a thick ring of suffocating humanity that began
to percuss with Harrington’s name.
TumTumTum.

Yes, he had been gone too long. Yes, I remember you and you but just as before I am
not your savior. No, he had not brought this one shoes, that one a visa.

The sooner you relinquished yourself to somebody, the sooner you could reclaim control,
and in the thicket of grabbing hands he selected two boys with familiar faces to carry
their luggage across the street to the bare cinder-block building that housed the
car rental agencies. The two became four became six and followed behind in a quarrelsome
knot, each boy tugging at the bags, each loud boy demanding payment at the door through
which they could not enter, each boy merrily given a crisp dollar bill by Dolan.

I see you speak the universal language of shakedown, Tom said wryly, nodding at Dolan’s
gold-plated money clip before it disappeared back into his pocket, and Dolan smiled
at the illusion of his largesse, a good-natured businessman taking care of his staff.
For the first time Tom wondered if he should consider himself Dolan’s employee; he
hadn’t thought about it beyond their gentleman’s agreement—Dolan would pay expenses,
the ticket, food and lodging, but beyond that there was no arrangement and Harrington
supposed he could stay or go as he wished. They did seem to be in agreement about
which rental company to use.

Sir, we thought you had forgotten us, the lugubrious counter agent said with wounded
dignity, putting his slack hand in Tom’s, as though the white man were another disappointment
to his day.

I did, he confessed.

We have not forgotten you.

No, I wouldn’t think so. Tom had managed to return one of his agency’s vehicles in
very bad condition and another with bullet holes through a door panel. How are things?
he asked.

We are enjoying the freedom you give us, the agent said, to go to hell. This democracy
you give Haiti is killing us.

Tom handed the agent his driver’s license and Dolan’s credit card and a minute later
Dolan looked up from the form he was signing and Harrington watched his methodical
style come into focus, the script of investigative habits that he understood existed
between them as both fraternal bond and ground for competition, brotherly or not.
Tell me something, said Dolan, setting his briefcase on the counter, flipping the
latches without opening it, and Tom listened to his conversation with the rental agent,
whose expression hardened warily as he realized the white man in front of him was
a type of policeman. The briefcase opened.
Oui,
said the agent, examining Dolan’s copy of an invoice; he was the one who had rented
the SUV to the American couple several weeks ago. True, the woman was murdered, the
vehicle stolen and left a short distance off the road near the swamps of Tintayen.
Everyone knew these things,
monsieur.

And the man and the woman, said Dolan. Tell me your impression of them.

I had no impression.

Happy, sad, irritated, friendly?

Normal.

Dolan reached back into his briefcase and extracted a brown envelope containing a
photograph of the client with his wife, the two of them side by side, lovers in bathing
suits, his arm clasped around her suntanned shoulder, posed in front of a giant concrete
reproduction of a conch shell that Harrington recalled having seen among the garden
of landscaping kitsch at Moulin Sur Mer. Let me see that, Tom said, and took the photograph
from Dolan as he pushed it across the counter toward the agent.

Harrington released an involuntary gasp. What’s the problem? asked Dolan, and he gave
Tom a hard look, studying his reaction. You okay?

I’m fine, he said, trying to stand straight and breathe normally. I know this woman.
Jackie. Jacqueline Scott. A blade of grief twisted into Harrington and through him
and then, replaced by arid pity, out, perhaps the only honest emotion he had ever
felt for her besides lust and anger, perhaps the only two responses a woman like Jackie
could expect from a man once she had his undivided attention.

That’s not her name, said Dolan.

All right, he said, steadying himself. Her hair’s cut different, and it’s been dyed,
but I know her. She was freelancing here during the occupation.

I was hoping you’d say that, said Dolan.

You knew? Harrington’s along-for-the-ride equanimity drained into a chilling emptiness
and he felt entrapped, his world contracting into Dolan’s, and for a moment on the
edge of his consciousness he was aware of a doubling into a second self, his first
self receding into the psychic numbing he knew so very well from his years of graveside
interviews but had never, not even at the unearthing of a stadium filled with bones,
experienced at a depth where everything, all the madness and pain, is meant to disappear.
He was sick in the revolting airless heat of the room, on the threshold of a lifelong
haunting.

No, I didn’t know, Dolan said. I knew it was a possibility.

Well, shit, he said, his mouth watering, and a foulness at the top of his throat as
if he might vomit; he spit on the floor to try to stop the sensation. Back in Miami,
Tom had not been clever in his appraisal of the retired special agent, imagining that
Dolan, always talking, one anecdote after another, a stream of true-crime monologues,
wanted Tom along just to have someone to attend his stories, drive the car, pick the
restaurants, make everything easy.

I was thinking, Tom said, the next time somebody invites me along on a trip, I might
ask for more particulars.

I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d come if I spelled it out up front.

You were right.

When Tom Harrington calmed down, he allowed that if Dolan’s client did not kill his
wife, whatever her name was, then perhaps there was a small chance that maybe he knew
who did, and Connie Dolan was expecting Tom to say that, too.

CHAPTER TWO

In the final days of the occupation, a Hollywood director came to Port-au-Prince as
a special guest of the National Palace to celebrate the great success of democracy
and the inauguration of the new president, swept into office by an election free and
fair in which no one felt inspired to actually vote. The director, whose work had
earned him an Academy Award, had loaned his celebrity to Haiti’s cause; he had championed
the refugees washing ashore in Florida, lobbied Congress, raised funds, advised the
president-in-exile, spoken out at rallies in Boston and New York and Miami and, with
his documentaries, had shown the world the reason for his outrage and his broken heart—the
brutalities of the tyrants, the blood of the innocents. His crusade had been noble
and for that he was welcomed and loved in the wasteland, and Tom Harrington himself
had admired him, and still did.

The director was part of the scene and, to a less public degree, so was Tom and Tom
wasn’t entirely surprised, the afternoon before the inauguration, to receive a message
at the desk of the Hotel Oloffson where he kept a small apartment, inviting him that
evening to dinner with the director and his group. After a shower and a change of
clothes he descended to the bar to listen to the day’s scrapings from the correspondents
who regularly gathered there to decompress—most would be leaving the country by week’s
end—and at the appointed hour drove himself up the darkening mountain, following its
sluggish river of traffic and black exhaust, to the once luxurious suburb of Petionville
and the gingerbread coziness of the Kinam Hotel.

The entourage—several producers and assistants, a screenwriter and her husband from
Santa Monica, a local driver who tripled as an interpreter and bodyguard—had already
taken seats around a long table on the patio, cocktails in hand, robust and mirthful,
cosmopolitan, the men in their black jeans and linen shirts, the women in flowery
sundresses. Had they gathered in the Seychelles or Saint-Tropez, they would have appeared
no different, and perhaps to Harrington’s discredit it had long since ceased to offend
him that even the worst places on earth somehow managed to cater to the appetites
of the well-heeled. He was offered the flattery of the one remaining chair at the
head of the table, lowering himself on a cushion of exchanged compliments, the director
to his right, a balding impish producer to his left.

Tell me, the director said, about Jacques Lecoeur.

Where the rutted track stopped at the bank of an aquamarine river flowing out from
the rugged and still timbered mountains of the northwest lived Jacques Lecoeur—without
meaning to, Tom made it sound quite like a fable. Lecoeur, a cocoa farmer and labor
organizer turned, in reputation at least, guerilla chieftain, provided the tyrants
with their only form of resistance in the years after the coup d’état. The generals
had sent their army marching day and night up the valley where Lecoeur’s people—peasants,
cultivators—resided, burning houses and schools, shooting whoever proved too slow
to flee. Lecoeur and his men and their families retreated into the refuge of the high
mountains, living in caves, scavenging for roots, lost to the world in the most paradisiacal
landscape Tom had ever seen anywhere in the tropics. Certainly this much was true:
the tyrants’ obsession with hunting down Lecoeur; and after the invasion, the Special
Forces’s obsession with outtricking Lecoeur, which they were never able to accomplish
in Lecoeur’s endless game of hide-and-seek. In this way, Lecoeur had become an enigmatic
celebrity, perhaps the only one Haiti had to offer the world. Because the U.S. military’s
intelligence units listened without discrimination to any voice that would whisper
a confidence into their many ears, their profile on Lecoeur was confounding, fragmented,
and contradictory: one week Lecoeur was a freedom fighter, the next a bandit and a
murderer; he was a warrior messiah, or maybe a gang leader; he and his men were weaponless
save for Lacoeur’s own pistol and a few M1s they had lifted from the Haitian army;
on the contrary, a Special Forces intel officer once told Harrington, the Cubans were
shipping them arms.

In the course of his mission, four times Harrington had hiked up through that burnt-out
valley and into the mountains to document the former regime’s crimes in the region,
twice unsuccessfully with American commandos, twice with various journalists who were
also Tom’s friends. When Lecoeur finally allowed himself to be found, appearing wraithlike
out of the jungle to sit with them in a clearing and endure their questions, Tom didn’t
know what to think about this unassuming man. He was shy, well-educated, articulate
without being dogmatic—Tom theorized he was perhaps nothing more than a modern-day
maroon, a runaway, a man who had refined the feral art of saving his own skin. No
hard evidence suggested otherwise but, even now, months later, the bloody reports
crackled down from the northwest mountains: overrun outposts, attacks on garrisons,
summary executions and assassinations and torchings, each incident of vengeance attributed
to the wily, bearded Lecoeur, Haiti’s Che Guevara, her Robin Hood. Personally, Tom
believed none of it, but the appeal of the myth was not lost on him. Lecoeur had what
moviegoers would recognize as star power.

The director was intrigued, engaged by these accounts of a true son of the land, a
reincarnation of the slave chieftains who had defeated, two hundred years earlier,
the slave owners, Napoleon, and the French.

I want to meet this guy, said the director. He wanted Harrington to take them up there.

Who? Tom asked, mildly alarmed. All of you? Around the table, their optimistic faces
bobbed excitement. It was possible, Harrington said, but the request made him uneasy.
He had a mental image of leading the sweaty troupe on a ghost chase around and around
the mountains, doused by squalls and roasted by the sun, their energy never flagging,
surrounded by a mosquito-cloud of ragged, mesmerized children. These were not timid
or naive people who readily balked at obstacles, yet when Tom explained the expedition
would take a day or two to arrange and two more to accomplish, with, of course, no
guarantee of safety or success, that was the end of the scheme, there was not enough
time to squeeze in the adventure. The entourage groaned their disappointment and picked
up their forgotten menus; the director turned to the screenwriter and began a separate
conversation; the waiter came and the table ordered and the director followed him
back to the kitchen to say something to the chef.

Sighing, the producer leaned toward Tom and laid his chin in the palm of his hand.
We’ve touched a nerve here, said the producer. Oliver Stone’s been to Chiapas, you
see, to meet Subcommandante Marcos.

Harrington did not think more or less of the director for this explanation; famous
people, powerful people, were drawn to each other, compelled to sniff out the scent
of their peers and judge them equal or inferior, look into the mirror of their own
importance, and he did not feel the compulsion was necessarily shallow or gratuitous
or insincere, only inevitable. There was no glory left in Haiti that wasn’t hollow
anyway; the grand campaigns, the highest principles, had all decayed or would soon
fail, but all of them were still pretending that their swords remained sharp, that
their crusades held meaning. It was simply the way you had to be in Haiti until the
day arrived when you could not be that way ever again.

And then there was a blast outside the Kinam, the concussion sending the faintest
kiss of air across the cheeks of the diners, who collectively tensed and caught their
breath. Excuse me, Harrington told the producer and slid back his chair. Someone nearby
out in the darkness had fired a gun and Tom had been conditioned by Haiti and its
predecessors to appreciate the coincidence of right time, wrong place. Now it was
pure curiosity; before that, in El Salvador, pure paralyzing fear. The driver stood
up with Tom and Harrington could see the butt of his pistol like a broken hip bone
jutting out from his waistband. Everyone else stayed in their seats. If there was
a story, they could hear it later.

But there was no story to bring back to them with their meals. The hotel manager and
the director were already on the sidewalk by the time the driver and Tom came out
to peer into the darkness of Petionville’s decrepit plaza, empty but for a few hardened
shadows passing underneath the vault of trees, a lone cook fire near the corner where
the tap-taps stopped for the hordes of passengers during the day. They listened carefully
for any further trouble but the streets were almost serene with the emptiness of their
secrets. A few police milled about on the apron of the station across the block at
the top of the square and it was there, the manager guessed, the shot had been fired.
Sometimes, he said, these fools even shoot themselves accidentally, playing with their
weapons.

The four men returned to the patio in an expansive mood, the director asking the solicitous
manager for a bottle of Barbancourt Special Reserve to be delivered to the table.
Their food was served in a steamy cloud of garlic and chili vinegar and grilled fish
and the talk turned to the year Tom Harrington had spent on the island investigating
its massacres. Had he seen much of the American commandos who controlled the countryside?
What did Tom think about the various pundits who were saluting or decrying America’s
rehabilitation of the warrior culture
? And then—Tom shouldn’t have been surprised but he was—the discussion turned to moviemaking.
The people at the table were planning to make a soldier movie set in Haiti.

This will be different, he overheard the director say to the screenwriter. We’re not
doing this for our Haitian friends, he said and she smiled knowingly and nodded once
that she understood. Let’s think patriotism, romance. A Green Beret and an aid worker?
A Green Beret and a Haitian woman?

Think
The Sand Pebbles
meets
M.A.S.H.,
said the producer.

What does that mean? Tom asked.

I don’t know, said the producer, except they’re both great movies. You’ll help us
out on this, won’t you?

The waiter replaced their dishes with slices of lime pie and glass chalices containing
smooth globes of mango sorbet. The director refilled Tom’s empty brandy snifter with
Barbancourt, which he compared to the finest cognac.

Tom smiled politely and sat back in his chair, not meaning to ponder the invitation
but he looked to be doing just that. The proposition seemed so offhand and uncalculated
that it struck him as cavalier, as if he were being gathered up to go to a party—come
on, hop in—and although he had no idea what he might possibly contribute to such a
novel enterprise as the making of a movie, of course, and perhaps naively, he agreed
to the unlikely project.

Haiti was the director’s true cause, his central passion—but Tom couldn’t say why,
and never dwelled on it. Harrington saw him twice more: the next day at the inauguration,
dressed in a business suit and seated among the dignitaries in the grandstand erected
in front of the National Palace, and then a final time coming out of Galerie Issa
with his entourage, stacks of paintings cradled in their arms. No one mentioned the
movie to Tom again, and it was never made.

On the periphery of the conversation, while they finished their pie and sorbet, Tom
had noticed the screenwriter get up from the table and disappear back around the corner
of the wall that separated the patio from the interior bar, presumably to find the
toilet. Now she returned light on her feet, a gust of excitement, her face flushed
with serendipity.

There is the most perfect, lovely girl around the corner, she announced breathlessly
to the table, and named a pixieish Hollywood actress who starred in romantic comedies
as the perfect, lovely girl’s identical twin. The screenwriter imagined the wolf in
her male friends’ expressions because she playfully admonished, You men stay away
from her, with a theatrical drawl.

The table trafficked in ingenues, though, and had no interest in her. On the other
hand, the actress who had been compared to the girl around the corner was one of Harrington’s
favorites, the standard-bearer for every Sally-next-door heartthrob fantasy the studios
could confect, and he found the temptation to have a quick look irresistible.

Excuse me, he said, popping up, a boyish grin on his face. I’ll be right back.

For once in Haiti, he was having an unqualified good time. The evening had made him
dizzy and unselfconsciously energized, drunk from the unaccustomed attention of well-known
people, and Tom Harrington felt he had rare gifts to hand out to any audience: charm
or knowledge or, god knows, some cause for happiness.

He walked toward the soft-lit pool at the rear of the hotel, turning where the patio
elbowed to the right along a stuccoed arcade, each of its arches providing a discreet
shelter for diners seeking privacy. She was in the third alcove, her back to him,
having dinner with a correspondent from the
Guardian
who had returned to London several months ago after the elections. The correspondent
glanced up from his conversation with the girl and, smiling broadly, his eyes met
Tom’s and he called him over. Suddenly embarrassed by his game, Tom lurched forward
to the side of their table, trying to remember the fellow’s name, and took the journalist’s
hand with unnatural exuberance, saying loudly,
Good to see you,
and
When did you get back?

Yesterday, he said. It’s too fucking quiet, isn’t it.

Tom shifted his eyes expectantly toward the girl but her head was tilted down at her
plate, only the golden crown of her head visible, the cut of her neck-length hair
shielding her face—a remote angel—and she made no effort to acknowledge Tom’s presence,
and so he returned his attention to her companion and they spoke for a few minutes
about mutual friends, Tom’s eyes darting back and forth between the fellow and the
girl until finally his
Guardian
friend felt prompted to introduce him.