The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (4 page)

Do you know Jacqueline?

When she raised her blue eyes to grant him an insincere smile, Tom was indeed astonished
by her resemblance to the famous actress, and instantly inflamed by her cover-girl
wholesomeness, the appearance of it at least. She had a nervous body, clapping knees
and restless arms, but was not timid under the scan of yet another pair of fixated
eyes, and regarded Tom with an utter absence of interest. Instead of dazzling, her
beauty seemed to be the source of profound comfort and unending satisfaction, the
American ideal, the girl every boy dreamed of courting and winning, the girl who made
every one of them crazy in high school and wretched in college, their universal torture
queen, blithe collector of tormented young hearts, the first and last girl to occupy
their beautiful self-told lies of perfect love, perfect companionship, the one they
could never stop needing and never stop hating and never get out of their minds. Hers
would be a slavish cult of eager youth and wicked men, and Tom could only be thankful
that, given the manifold distances between them—she in her midtwenties, he entering
his forties; a mathematical separation not quite tainted by the dread of imaginary
fatherhood—any intimacy they might impossibly stumble into would be short and bitter,
rather than what it would have been otherwise: prolonged and destructive. Still, she
was a cookie, a forbidden treat you may or may not be allowed, and although he had
nothing to say to her and nothing came to mind, he could not take his eyes off her.

Jackie’s a photographer, said the fellow from the
Guardian,
and Tom tried to see her more clearly through the perspective of her profession but
she was too green, too studied in her wrinkled clothes: baggy, many-pocketed khaki
pants and an immaculate V-neck T-shirt the color of a lemon. No jewelry, not even
a wristwatch, except for small gold studs in her ears—not a total naïf, then; at least
she knew not to bait herself for a mugging.

Who do you work for? Tom asked.

Nobody. She shrugged and examined her unpainted fingernails. Tom looked to the
Guardian
for an explanation but he cocked an eyebrow and shrugged as well.
Weird chick,
said his face, and Tom thought,
Does she not understand where she is?

Good luck, he said and retreated to his table.

Later he would always think how peculiar it was, the way he met her—hardly a meeting
at all. A comic impulse to mock the implication in the screenwriter’s half-serious
warning to stay away from her. Tom had only wanted a look. It was nothing really,
a sixty-second charade of voyeurism and desire.

A quick look, and then he could tell himself that he knew her story, but it was the
other way around, somehow she knew his, and it would be a while before he began to
believe she had meant to be at the Kinam that night, sitting with an acquaintance
of Tom’s, and only the details of how he came to her table could be called coincidence.

Well? prompted the screenwriter, giddy with anticipation. Did you see her? What did
I tell you? She’s fabulous, right?

We’re engaged, Tom said, and everybody snickered. But he was afraid that somehow she
embodied a cycle in his life, a bad old season blowing in, and already he hoped to
see her again.

CHAPTER THREE

As they were leaving the airport, his anger with Connie Dolan receded toward the fact
of the matter; the girl was dead—murdered—and he could not escape the guilty notion
that he owed her this if nothing else, the decency of caring. Despite Dolan’s manipulations,
he would consent to the intent of their partnership, without making much of an effort
to explain to himself why.

Tom merged with the traffic headed into the city, four lanes on a two-lane road and
everybody doing as he pleased. Over on the right, that big compound is the LIC, he
said. The Americans headquartered there, once they secured the airport.

Yeah, yeah, fuck, said Dolan, paling, his attention fixed nervously on the road. You’re
driving too fast.

I should probably tell you about Eville, said Tom.

On his final visit to the LIC, Harrington was overwhelmed by its stark atmosphere
of pathos and impending abandonment, and it struck him as a pitiful thing when a great
army decamps quietly at the end of an ambiguous campaign, neither victorious nor defeated
but simply done, a giant suddenly weary of his own strength and the raw lack of circumstances
to use it properly, the world rendered arbitrary by a vacuum of purpose. What was
once a paranoid protocol of security checkpoints, identity confirmations, pat downs
and wandings and assigned escorts from the Public Affairs office had dwindled to a
lone guard waving Tom through the gates and past the outdoor souvenir market, an on-base
convenience for the eternally busy Americans, the vendors staring out from their ramshackle
kiosks like people resigned to the perpetuity of their thirst. They were there to
sell to the soldiers, but the soldiers were gone. Well, very near gone.

It was late in the afternoon the day of the inauguration and Tom had just come from
the ceremony at the palace, where he had stood sweating on the lawn in front of the
portico, straining to make out the portentous words of the new president, wearing
for the first time the tricolored sash of his office, as he addressed his nation.
He was tall and gaunt, bearded and handsome, impeccably dressed in a black suit—a
former baker converted to the religion of politics by an ex-priest ascended through
the politics of religion, but he mumbled into the thicket of microphones on the podium,
and Tom couldn’t understand him.

What’s he saying? Tom asked a stick-thin Haitian journalist pressed against him in
the crowd.

I don’t know, either, said the Haitian. He’s drunk.

Did he just say, Fuck America?

Non, monsieur,
the journalist smiled with sly eyes, enjoying the question. The president cannot say
that today. The president said,
Beaucoup. Merci beaucoup, America.
Tomorrow he can say this other thing.

A dwindling afternoon of sepia-tinted air and smoky, dark palm silhouettes in the
gauze of light. In a grove of hardwood trees next to the cavernous metal building
where the military had established its command and control center, Harrington saw
what he mistook for a barbecue, merry soldiers in running shorts and olive T-shirts
attending burn cans topped by a blue whip of flames. Out the open door at the side
of the building—a former warehouse for the boatloads of cheap bras and dime-store
undies manufactured at the LIC before the embargo crushed what passed for an economy
in Haiti—another soldier appeared with another carton of documents to tilt into the
burn, the attendants stirring the heavy sheaves of files with iron rods, a self-cleaning
military, emptying the infinite bureaucracy of its mind of petty obsessions, institutional
whisperings, the myriad little secrets of the occupation. If you wanted to know what
happened here, he thought, learn to read the ashes.

Anybody seen Eville? Tom had asked.

Who?

Master Sergeant Eville Burnette, Third Group Special Forces.

Their shaved heads nodded him through the door and his boots echoed the length of
the concrete, through a space he had last seen veined with cables and wires and branchings
of line, everywhere hookups and uplinks and patch-ins into the mad electric flow of
information, wall to wall with cubicles and folding cots, gear everywhere, coffee
urns and water coolers, uniforms bull-penned in a cacophony of briefings and debriefings,
the human heat and stifling wet air shoved back and forth by industrial fans. Troops
sacked out, officers on the phone, on the computer, talking to satellites, officers
giving stand-up interviews to the networks, troops watching themselves on CNN, and
if you asked anybody inside the LIC what was going on, the only true and enduring
answer you could never get was,
Nothing,
or simply,
Behold—we exist
.

Tom loved coming here, the odd sense of visiting a very efficient factory that produced
essentially useless things.

The Special Forces hated it at the LIC. Coming out of the countryside to Port-au-Prince,
coming to headquarters, was the worst sort of punishment they could handle without
dropping their legendary composure and going berserk. Here, in the LIC, generals weaned
on the Cold War screamed about their mustaches, about the sleeves of their battle-dress
blouses tucked in a jungle roll, told them to put their helmets on, take their sunglasses
off. Stand straight, put on your seat belt, get a haircut
now,
I want to hear you sons of bitches speaking English.
Yessir,
sir. When they left their outposts in the hinterlands and walked into the LIC to
deal with the conventional army, the SF pretended they were among foreigners, in another
country altogether where they may or may not be the enemy.

Eville and his team had been up north in Saint-Marc, the last Special Forces unit
to be pulled back to the capital and now the last operational detachment left in Haiti,
assigned the delicate honor of training a palace guard, the president’s own private
army, its predecessor known worldwide and to history as the Ton Ton Macoutes, a synonym
for paramilitary terror. They were the debutantes of the inauguration, the new guard,
their presence heralding the official end to the American intervention in Haiti, and
since the palace guard had gotten through the day without launching a coup d’état,
and had further established its professionalism by restraining its natural urge to
shoot, beat, or club the citizens, Harrington imagined Eville and his guys would be
congratulating themselves for this memorable afternoon spent in the maternity ward
of democracy, handing out cigars.

But inside the LIC that day instead of celebration he found only gloom and disgust,
its mighty enterprise humbled into the far corner of the vast warehouse that was a
constantly shrinking warren of plywood stalls, bare walls without ceilings, blankets
and rain ponchos draped for doors. Before calling Eville’s name, Tom stood on the
threshold of the colony and listened: the springy patter of a keyboard, faraway rock
and roll leaking out from someone’s headphones, a tubalike fart greeted by a groan.

In here, said Eville, and his voice led Tom through the maze to the sergeant’s kennel.

Eville sat on the edge of his cot, hunched over, elbows on his knees, the son and
grandson and great-grandson of a Montana ranching family, staring at his massive steer-roping
hands as if they had been painted with disgrace. Tom lowered himself down on a footlocker
facing him and sat quietly for a while, waiting for Eville to speak but he could not
stitch together words and Tom was bewildered and saddened by the sight because the
master sergeant was a strong man in every way, open and true even in his unmilitary
emotions, and now Tom was seeing him made weak.

Say, Ev, you all right, man?

His team had been shipped out in the middle of the night. No warning, said Eville,
nothing, just,
Listen up, girls, there’s a C-130 waiting for you at the airport and I want you on
it in one hour because you are outta here
. Eville raised his head, his eyes red with the sting of betrayal. They left me and
Stew and Brooks to sweep up, we have a couple more pallets to pack and then that’s
the ball game, back to Bragg by the end of the week,
Hey baby, I’m home, let’s pick up the pieces of our sorry-ass lives
. He paused and shook his head like a boxer after a roundhouse punch, his flat, plain
face contorted by anguish, and said softly—Eville was always soft-voiced, you could
look at him and guess that about him—Man, we should have been there today. We were
screwed by our chain, man.

Command—not Special Operations but the dinosaurs, the fossils, the holdbacks in the
regular army, the ones still fighting communists and Vietnam—had forbidden Master
Sergeant Eville Burnette and his captain and warrant officer and the nine other commandos
on their A-team to go anywhere near the National Palace during the inauguration, and
it didn’t matter that the team had a right to be there in the background, taking pride
in the moment with the men they had trained, and it no longer mattered that for eighteen
months, while the Green Berets had been living hard and working like sled dogs, the
politicians in Washington couldn’t decide who the enemy was. Were the good guys the
bad guys or were the ones they had come here to kill—the
macoutes
and the vampires and the tyrants—the bad guys, and after a while it seemed the answer
was, well, everybody’s a bad guy but work with them anyway. But now here was a fresh
new answer, definitive and irreversible, the bad guys were the Special Forces, a magnet
for negative press, straggling back in from their little kingdoms with weapons missing
and vehicles unaccounted for, guilty of the twin heresies of self-reliance and self-importance,
and no one stepped forward to protect them from the outrage of the generals.

It always fucking ends this way, said Eville, and Tom couldn’t help but feel sorry
for him, his congenital optimism replaced by this devastation of malaise, the insinuation
that he had not done the job he had been asked to do, that he had somehow performed
shoddily, dishonorably. Harrington, who had seen them, watched them—Eville and his
men and other Special Forces teams salted throughout Haiti—knew that the truth burned
brightly at the other end of the spectrum. They came and left with a deep faith that
they could fix things, but they couldn’t fix Haiti, and now in their failure they
had begun to hate the island in order to keep from doubting themselves.

Eville Burnette waved off Tom’s attempt to commiserate; he didn’t need an apologist
and he didn’t want a cheerleader and they would have this mandatory silence between
them on the subject of failure. Instead Harrington invited him to dinner the following
night though he wasn’t sure if anyone was actually free to leave the base.

Bring some friends if you want.

I have friends? Eville asked, but he was smiling.

The sergeant warmed to the idea of stepping out, stepping away, the one thing you
could almost never do on a deployment but who was left to tell him no. His mood swung
up and the smile expanded into his eyes. Hey, he said. It’s okay. I did what I came
to do, the people of this country are free again, we only lost one of our own, and
I didn’t have to kill anyone.

But Harrington found himself thinking darkly that maybe we’d all be better off if
you had.

Harrington and Dolan came to a stop in an infernal tangle of traffic, opposing lanes
suddenly head-to-head, drivers standing in the road engaged in the popular theater
of shouting matches.

Connie Dolan said with a mischievous lilt that he had no idea humanitarian do-gooders
like Tom were inclined to be so kissy with the military and then laughed when he saw
the spark in Harrington’s eyes. No, come on, he said. What’s the deal with Eville?

This is an easy one, Tom said, his voice deliberately tight. What did you say you
used to do? Special agent for what?

Okay, I got it, said Dolan, bemused. Everybody gets a kick out of playing wiseass
with cops, right? You want me to guess. He knew the girl.

Right, but Tom didn’t know how the sergeant knew her, only that he had the uncomfortable
feeling they knew each other from somewhere else besides Haiti. There was something
about them together I couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, said Tom. Something about
their relationship was really off. Or really on. Maybe that was it.

You’re saying they had a thing together.

I doubt any man could have a thing with Jackie.

You say that because?

She was insane.

Dolan seemed to consider this. And you’re familiar with the insane, he said. That’s
not a question.

That goddamn girl, Tom said, talking to himself, a gravelly release of breath. She
had managed to make him less of a man than he thought he was and he had done everything
he could to forget her, to will her nonexistent, but there was no reprieve from a
succubus and for the two years since he had last seen her Jackie had found her way
into his dreams, waiting there for him on the street corner of his libido like a neighborhood
whore, and now here out of the blue was Dolan, delivering her volatile presence back
into Tom’s life and in that respect it hardly mattered if she were dead or not.

What do you mean,
That’s not a question
? he said, snapping at Dolan. What the fuck is that supposed to mean,
I’m familiar with the insane
?

It’s a joke.

Give me a heads-up the next time you plan on being funny.

Drivers slammed horns, threw up their arms, got out, yelled, and Tom thought, being
summoned as an expert witness to pronounce over the dark adventure of Jackie’s life
was the last thing he ever wanted to be doing with his own and yet once again he was
trapped by his unhealthy curiosity for her. Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he’d
say—he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but
then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul.