The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (54 page)

Yeah.

How about this? chirped Mary Beth, holding up a very unlike–Mary Beth paisley minidress.
It never fit me anyway, she said. I’m afraid the hemline will cover your knees. It’ll
probably hang on you like a bag but we can belt the waist. Whaddya think, honey? Your
mother will kill me if I put you on a plane in those filthy clothes. And by the way,
I shouldn’t say anything, but whoever did your hair—

I know, said Dottie, it’s gross.

She wanted more than anything to apologize to Mary Beth for being such a brat on the
telephone, all those many days ago when her life with Osman was the only thing she
had imagined she could believe in. After,
I’m sorry,
her voice cracked and Mary Beth held out her arms and said,
Baby, come here,
and she got off the bed onto her knees and crawled to this woman who knew her and
held her and told her that her own heart was bleeding with the knowledge of a young
girl’s juggernaut of loss. Mary Beth let her cry for a while and then eased Dottie’s
head from her shoulder, telling her to go jump into the shower and she would order
from room service and they would eat and then lights out for the big day tomorrow.

Outside came a boom, far away but strong enough to rattle the windows. What the hell
was that? asked Mary Beth.

That’s just the cannon in Taksim Square, said Dottie, drying her eyes. You know, they
shoot it off every day at sundown.

Of course, said Mary Beth. The cannon. It must be time to pray.

Her dreams that last night in Istanbul were waking dreams where she watched herself
watching a conveyor belt of images—Maranian with a hand line fishing along the quay,
her father genuflecting before the Pope, Karim riding a miniature donkey, Osman eating
the pages of a book (the Koran?), Elena giving a blowjob to an Arabic man wearing
a suicide bomber’s belt—crazy things, and everything unreachable except through unwavering
sorrow.

What happened?
Even stuck in the middle of things, you don’t always know.

Sometime during the night there was a phone call that awakened her. Is that my father?
she had mumbled into the darkness. Mary Beth said yes, go back to sleep, which must
have happened because she had no memory of any conversation after that. Then, in the
taxi on the way to the airport, she suddenly remembered. Did my father call last night?
Mary Beth said yes, he had phoned to warn them to be careful. Why? she asked and Mary
Beth said because yesterday a Pan Am flight in Karachi had been hijacked. Sixteen
passengers were dead.

For days she would keep trying to refasten herself to the old calendar and its shattered
trajectories. August twenty-fourth? August twenty-fifth? The calendar was not telling
her what she needed to know. Sixth, seventh, eighth? September sixth!

September sixth was the Istanbul airport, soldiers with machine guns posted everywhere
as she queued up to enter the international terminal.

September sixth she didn’t know about until Mary Beth escorted her to the airport
for their midmorning flight. September seventh was early morning in the airport in
Frankfurt, saying good-bye to Mary Beth and waiting alone for her connection to Dulles
and a headline in the
Herald Tribune
about the assassination of a Turkish diplomat in Bonn, an alleged retaliation for
the assassination by police in Istanbul of one Raffi Maranian, identified as a leader
of an underground organization of terrorists, the Commandos of the Armenian Genocide.
Without buying the paper, she scanned the lead paragraphs of the story at a kiosk
and then stopped reading because what it said happened in Istanbul was not what had
happened and apparently journalists too were licensed to lie like anybody else.

Oh, God. Saturday September sixth was the Istanbul airport swarming with soldiers
brandishing automatic weapons because the morning of September sixth was a pair of
Palestinian terrorists who locked themselves inside the synagogue in Karakoy during
Sabbath services and slaughtered everybody and blew them up with hand grenades and
burned them with gasoline and in the terminal she began shrieking,
The Kirlovskys! My God!
because the Neve Shalom synagogue near the Galata Tower was their synagogue
and she ran to a telephone cubicle and called Elena and kept calling until her flight
was announced and then she called again from Frankfurt and whoever answered said Mr.
Kirlovsky was dead and after the funeral and shiva the family would be emigrating
to Israel.

September seventh was late afternoon in humid Virginia and the ugly satisfaction of
the look of repressed revulsion on her mother’s face when her emaciated listless daughter
emerged from Customs wearing an ill-fitting paisley smock, Dottie’s cheeks and forehead
an angry hatch of acne and old bruises, and her golden hair chopped short and badly
hennaed. Her mother’s bright blundering, neurotically insistent—
I know you’ll just love your senior year at Madeira, you’ll just love your new room.
Gosh, wouldn’t you love to stop for a good old American cheeseburger—
on the drive down the access road back to Vienna and the ivy-skirted white-brick faux-colonial
town house that served as the command post of her mother’s dubious liberation. She
was a disaffected ex-liberal who, like her newly adopted guru, a neocon pundit acquired
at a Georgetown dinner party, had been mugged by reality. And Dottie was unyielding
in her hostility, refusing to acknowledge the irony or shorten the distance. What
she wanted didn’t even make sense—to go home, but where was that? To be healed by
her mother—but who was that? She had learned at an early age that she could get along
very well without a mother.

August twenty-fourth.

August twenty-fourth was the cruelest joke anyone might ever imagine and in her memory
she would sidestep away from its indistinct serpentlike manifestation with a startled
jerk, stumbling in horror, her torment expanding until she was crying so hard she
would wake up hours later, her face buried in a pillow still wet and cold with slobber.

The girl who drowned really didn’t but the boy who drowned really did—this was the
joke of August twenty-fourth and it kept returning her to Istanbul and exiling her
to America and pitching her right back again into the lovesick clutch of Osman. And
then she would find herself curled into an icy glob of space where she accepted she
would remain forever, rocking in his lifeless arms and then not rocking at all but
frozen by the immensity of loss and the immensity of the world’s malevolence and its
dim reverberation in her blood.

Day after day after day, a refugee in Virginia and ostensibly an invalid and certainly
disabled by the savage loop of time playing in her head, as the season shrank toward
winter, she did little else but stay in bed and count the calendar, those days from
the end of August to the day in September when she was delivered back to the West,
trying to unscramble the bloodcurdled lump of time that seemed like a perpetual infernal
day in hell and a single permanent night at the frozen edge of the universe, the sun
rising and setting simultaneously out of Asia and into Europe or maybe she had that
backward like everything else and all that was the world as she knew it had vanished
and was condemned and ripped away, her mind blank from rage and incomprehension and
the abysmal indigo depths of shredding grief. It was as if somebody had smashed her
head with a crowbar.

In mid-September, looking around her room in her mother’s town house, she slowly realized
why her father had shipped her off to Virginia. Dottie was being offered back to her,
like a coat she had left at a party the year before and wasn’t sure she wanted to
wear anymore, even if it still fit, which it did not. But losing Dottie was his mistake,
not hers.

Whoever she was now about to become, that self would be a solitary creation, patented
and inviolable, cobbled together and pounded into shape from its kaleidoscopic shamble
of bits and pieces. Henceforth as her mother’s ward she would practice the art of
hibernation, subservient to her studies, passive in a social life that amounted to
singing in the choir at St. Luke’s, waiting for the light and growth of a new season
and her happiness in finding herself alive again. She had wandered in the wilderness
and mingled with its natives but she would come back, she kept telling herself. I
will come back.

September seventh was that first terrible night in her mother’s town house which stank
of chemicals, geriatric potpourri and pukey air freshener and toilet bowl cleaner,
her mother standing in the kitchen in a coral-colored linen suit and stockings and
heels and her brunette hair permed into motionless waves, opening a bottle of white
wine for herself and offering Dottie a ginger ale. Let’s go sit in the living room,
her mother said, grabbing the bottle and a wineglass and Dottie drifted behind her
like a wraith into a purgatory of inanities. The living room seemed to be a midwestern
celebration of chintz and the walls were churchy with evenly spaced icons and crucifixes
with strands of dried palm leaf tucked behind Christ’s sagging head and her mother
plunked down on the sofa and kicked off her shoes and straightened her skirt over
her shiny knees and slurped her wine and wouldn’t shut up, reborn with the freedom
to express herself uncontested, striving again for her emotions to embody substance,
to suddenly contain genuine political meaning or stir involvement, trying to attach
this resurgence of powerful feelings to an intellect she did not possess.

All great love affairs are tragic, her mother told her, trying to justify the less
than dramatic fraud of her own marriage. I’m sorry about your friend, that boy who
got himself mixed up with the wrong crowd, her mother had said the night of their
unhappy reunion. But you know, your father tried to warn you, didn’t he, and you wouldn’t
listen.

But Dottie found her mother’s voluble insights unworthy of love and despicable and
whining. I’ll never understand, said her mother, why some people just can’t let other
people go. People shouldn’t always have to live with their mistakes. And she breezily
explained her child-rearing philosophy—I didn’t pamper you for a reason, and it took
everything I had to keep your father from spoiling you. Unlike your brother, you were
quite a headstrong child. Disobedient, self-centered—beyond my comprehension, honestly.
Show weakness? Not a chance. Ask for help? No, ma’am. And later, slurring and loose-lipped,
the bottle empty, the cadence deliberate: As a woman, well, let’s just say I allowed
myself to be made a mother.

And then as she guided her daughter to her room: When are you going to stop being
mad at me? Goddamn it, Dorothy, what is the point of this shunning? Dottie paused,
hollow-eyed as a prisoner being led to her cell, absorbing the soulless chill of her
new bedroom, peaches and cream, ivory-colored trimmings and good-girl tidiness, before
she turned around to look at her mother without any discernible emotion and said,
I think I have syphilis or the clap or something, I don’t really know.

Hate me if you want, said her mother. You’re still my daughter, no matter what.

In late September she was admitted to Fairfax Hospital for observation, nourished
through a tube, and the nurse who came to monitor her IV drip talked about how it
looked as though Virginia’s Indian summer was a goner and then went away. In the opinion
of the so-called experts she was anorexic but she wasn’t. Eating seemed irrelevant
at the moment and could not hold her interest beyond a bite of this and a sip of that.
She was definitely not trying to kill herself—quite the opposite; she was determined
to get on with her life, if she could only resolve the question of which self would
end up being the lucky person who walked out of there. The competition was not fixed,
the winner not a given. On her only weekend there her brother Christopher came and
brought her flowers and they played a game of backgammon and she apologized for being
so weird and when he began to talk about their life in Africa she foolishly dared
to confide her biggest secret, how everything had started back then in Kenya. You
know, touching and stuff, she tried to explain but Christopher cut her off. Dad? he
said, owl-eyed, stunned, offended.

I don’t believe you.

She contemplated the riddle of love, creating a dissonance in her thoughts that she
found ferociously appealing, a mental form of self-scarring that seemed to validate
the high cost of her experience and the exhausting struggle to understand. However
you go about explaining it, she thought, love was what diminished you when it was
not there.

In October she watched the maple tree outside her window in Vienna release its leaves
with each fresh gust of winter-laden wind, like flocks of red birds scattering away
to the gray horizon to become gray themselves and then nothing.

In mid-December she rode with her mother and Christopher to Dulles to meet her father’s
flight from Europe. The shuttle brought him from the plane to the terminal and there
he was and she was staring at him, abject, lovelorn, and he waited, with hopeful eyes,
for his daughter to take the first step forward, back into his arms.

Book Four

The Friends of Golf

I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.

—General James Mattis, US Marine Corps

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

They slipped Eville away from his unit in Haiti and brought him up to Miami for a
few hours to caddy for Steven Chambers, the first of numerous occasions in the following
years. Something Chambers said to him that first time put everything in perspective
afterward.
We don’t fly under the radar, son,
he said.
We
are
the radar. We’re not operating with situational values here.

True leaders did not look at a fire and ask,
What should I do?
True leaders were those men who know what to do and how to do it and, with or without
policy, do it, and so it gets done, and it was to them that Master Sergeant Burnette
had always owed his allegiance.

You could find them some days between temperate equinoxes on the links outside the
District, convened on the first tee in these final years of the millennium, chins
tucked and heads bowed and testicles snug, smacking their drives two hundred and fifty
yards and beyond toward the middle of the fairway. They made the game look easy and
natural and powered by grace, dialed in to the sweet and the straight, their balls
nested in a little egglike cluster out at the edge of your vision. It was the kind
of perfect placement you get from guidance systems orbiting the planet and that tempted
you to think
they had the course wired up, had punched the coordinates.

What they called themselves with wry half-smiles was the Friends of Golf, FOG, perhaps
an advertent self-parody—a permanent threesome with a rotating fourth, selected guests
invited on some other basis than handicaps or dead-eye putting, although they would
not abide hackers given the tightness of their game. Hackers would be told to pick
up their ball at some point along the front nine, or they would pick it up themselves
when the scorn became too much to bear, and heaven help you if they caught you cheating,
an inevitable reminder of the commander in chief’s sleazy penchant for mulligans.
They could not forgive the ineptitude of arrogance, the cavalier stupidity of players
who voluntarily exposed their weaknesses and their commensurate need for forgiveness
and let themselves be caught.

Eville Burnette saw the humor in that, a round-robin contest of the unscrupulous,
the sly and the underhanded, the touts and the rogues, fox versus fox. Whatever anybody
thought he was, Burnette was not a dumb-ass, although it took him an extra beat to
sniff out what the chefs from FOG had cooking on their collective burners.

The course they preferred was west out on Highway 50 toward Front Royal and the Blue
Ridge Mountains, a club called International Town and Country on a post-revolutionary
estate known as Chantilly, far enough beyond the beltway to allow for the secure privacy
they would never find at the metropolitan courses like Burning Tree or Congressional,
where every golfer had ears. With the earth tilting against them around Halloween
and the harvest moon, they would migrate south with the snowbirds to their fair-weather
favorites—Pinehurst and then Augusta and then the Doral, their midwinter haunt in
Miami. When the Friends of Golf dreamed of the game they dreamed of the balmy January
morning they would dance on Castro’s grave and tee up on the course Rockefeller had
built in the glory days along Varadero Beach. You’re in fine company, Chambers liked
to joke with Eville Burnette. Che Guevara was a caddy down in Argentina, before he
bought a motorcycle.

The three regulars had nicknamed themselves after some of the legends of the sport—Undersecretary
Chambers was Arnie, Undersecretary Milliken from DOD was Ben (Hogan, of course) and
Sammy, after Sam Snead, was the alter ego for the player formally attached to the
Agency, whose real name and title Master Sergeant Burnette was never told and never
troubled himself to know, but titles were often misleading in the league where these
men played. Their fourth might be anybody with a useful skill set—lawyers, bankers,
congressmen, arms dealers, patriotic celebrities, psychics, moguls from the media
or defense industries, lobbyists, syndicate capos, cyber-engineers, oil men, narcotraffickers,
professors, contractors or their subs, collectors, retainers, cowboys, or call girls—whoever
you were, if they needed you they found a way to work you into the picture, foregrounds
and backgrounds cropped and bleached and classified far beyond mortality, the image
simple proof of their existence and nothing more. Anybody who came to them bearing
a simplistic back-channel mentality only earned FOG’s derision, since they operated
quite a few levels beyond or below or behind that, in an endless hallway of locked
and unidentified doors that opened into nothing until one door in fact opened into
everything, but you were never going to have access to that door.

Burnette would learn a few things, though—Arnie was Roman Catholic, Ben a Southern
Baptist, Sammy a Jew for Jesus who had accepted Christ as the Messiah and been saved.
Eventually Burnette would come to understand the importance of their faith. They were
graduates of Yale. He could see how that was important too, their vanities starched
and pressed just so. They were not grizzled, not brawny or physically intimidating—Chambers
was like a silvery elm and the other two short and sinuous with cabled sheaths of
muscle like rock climbers, spider monkeys, trapeze artists—little guys immune to both
weight gain and criticism. Little guys with big dicks, or at least big-dick syndrome.
Phallocrats. The three of them together cast a glinting aura of sunny optimism, come
to conquer, the self-confidence of men accustomed to the winner’s circle.

The world, the Friends of Golf were fond of saying, is not run from a house on Pennsylvania
Avenue. They were the architects of the unseen, the fabrication of interlocking subterranean
networks and processes that formed the human infrastructure of what are known as deep
events—multigenerational efforts routed together into a fusion that seemed to hold
together everything in the cosmos of power, the continuum of power, the throb of ancient
algorithms, an almost mystic coming together of forces converging across a grid of
specialties. Deep events evolved in deep time and produced tectonic shifts in human
affairs. Something happens, something obviously cataclysmic, where even the unexpected
was not to be mistaken for a coincidence. There are no coincidences, and everything
counts.

It all depended on the science of applied pressure and counterpressure, making sure
that when things break—nations, ideologies, economies, atoms—they break to your advantage.
And break they will.

In the final years of the twentieth century, the Friends of Golf were the Shakespeares
of two events, the first in 1989—to which they had devoted every ounce of their energy
and intellect and merciless ingenuity throughout their careers—and it turned out pretty
well, in Kabul, and then, before the year was out, Berlin. The end of the wall begat
what some happy fools had called the end of history and served as a vindication of
more than just their methodology—it was a validation of their most sacred beliefs,
a validation of their souls, yet an incomplete redemption for Steven Chambers until
Croatia declared its independence in 1991, fulfilling the lifelong dream of Stjepan
Kovacevic. There were anxious thinkers in the family who fretted that the end of communism
left a void in the West, which would require the development of a new enemy—UFOs and
aliens were being tossed around as candidates—but the Friends of Golf knew otherwise,
and they were obsessed now with the second event, the eternal one ascending out of
the twilight of the centuries—what the Muslims would come to call the Narrative, the
hatred awakening into the bigger abomination under the eyes of God, not the end of
ideology but the reanimation of the conflict between ultimate good and ultimate evil.
The Friends of Golf believed themselves to be the true playwrights and producers of
the Narrative, adapted for a new generation of bloody thespians. The old firestorm
the same as the new firestorm, the sky opening to disgorge flumes of liquid death
down upon God’s enemies. Funding it, steering it, smashing it headlong through the
bureaucratic clog into the wall of illusions and cowardice otherwise known to them
as diplomacy, a waste product of gutless politicians, the short-term thinking of moral
invertebrates.

What Eville Burnette did not know—but what he would come to know—was that they were
all hands of the Company, the commissars and satraps and water carriers of the Deep
State, a familial nexus of assets and adjuncts, overt and covert and beyond into a
netherworld of unidentifiable phantoms, daylighters and midnighters and cave dwellers.
In any combination spread they constituted the dark matter of the world of intelligence.
They lived in two realms at once, like a certain kind of particle in quantum physics,
simultaneously occupying the moral antipodes of a universe looking back at itself
in a mirror, the entire world a shell company for another world, one reality a parallel
for still another reality.

They had been poised for war since they were kids shagging balls at the practice range
for a nickel a bucket, listening to the veterans back from Europe or the Pacific or
North Africa, who’d warn the boys of the unfinished nature of the job of freedom.
The poison was out there still, shape-shifting
,
flowing through the cracks in civilization.
It’s in your hands now, boys,
which is not unwanted news to a gung-ho kid, an inspiration to grow up fast and be
the future
.
That, in any case, was how it was for Eville Burnette, when his father returned from
Southeast Asia.

Not many people ever knew that a generation of Montana smoke jumpers had been snatched
up by CIA recruiters like Paperlegs Peterson and Big Andy Anderson in the sixties
and sent to Indochina. The rationale was obvious enough—young men this far out on
the edge of sane behavior, willing to dive out of the sky into a flaming forest, were
an ideal resource for the clandestine death-match rodeo the Agency was running in
the jungles of Laos. Crazy winged wranglers with nothing exciting to do in the off-season
but keep the cattle fed or go to college. You could not train people to be fearless
nuts like the Missoula smoke jumpers were—by Western birth and inclination. Not to
mention the money—the Agency stuffed their saddlebags with tax-free cash. And they
made the best
kickers
in the world, pushing cargo out of C-130s and C-46s and C-47s for Air America, payloads
of weapons and food meticulously weighed and rigged to chutes and rolled out the doors
over a drop zone in a matter of arduous seconds, hosed with adrenaline. A bad drop
was worse than no drop at all, a gift to the enemy, and they didn’t make mistakes.

Dawson Burnette had been hired as a C-130 kicker in 1960 with ten other smoke jumpers
from the Missoula and McCall base camps for a mission called Operation Barnum. Barnum
was about a place Eville Burnette’s father had never heard or dreamed of—a Himalayan
kingdom called Tibet, invaded by the Red Chinese, where the Agency was running an
insurgency with Tibetan fighters known as Khampas. Dawson flew the Himalayas that
winter in an unbroken fever of joyous wonder, kicking men and supplies out onto the
ice-walled plateaus north of Annapurna, and then he returned to Missoula for the fire
season. By the time the snows were blanketing the Bitterroots in the fall, the Agency
asked him to report to Guatemala, where he joined a pair of other jumpers training
parachutists and riggers for what they were told would be an invasion of Cuba. That
was 1961, the year the US Army created the Golden Knights, an elite team of showcase
jumpers designed to battle the Soviet pioneers in the clouds, the Reds a step ahead
in world domination thanks to parachuting genius.

By 1962, Dawson Burnette was in Thailand, resupplying General Vang Pao’s guerilla
army across the border in Laos, but he made it home in time for that summer’s wildfires
and stayed put for the next two years to finish his university degree in forestry
and start a family, marrying the sister of a smoke jumper from over near Bozeman,
a ranch-raised girl named Paige who loved books and fly-casting and training Appaloosa
barrel racers to turn on a dime.

Eville, the first of three sons, was born in 1965, the same month his father landed
in Thailand, back in the Agency’s fold, a branded maverick, part of a crew of smoke
jumpers sent there to train PARUs, Parachute Aerial Reinforcement Units, and build
helo landing pads and STOL airstrips on the ridgelines overlooking the Plain of Jars.
For the next three years he’d pogo back and forth between his off-season secret war
in Laos and the mountains of the Northwest, making babies and fighting blowups in
Montana and Idaho, disappearing to Fort Carson in Colorado or Marana Airpark outside
of Tucson for days and sometimes weeks to test R and D projects for special operations—a
remote-control para-wing, a chute with a guidance system hooked to a frequency from
a ground-to-air beacon, a Parachute Impact System that allowed pilots to stay out
of the range of small-arms fire—then back on the weekends for barbecues on the ancestral
ranch, home now to his own wife and his own children and most everybody else in Montana
who proudly shared the worthy name Burnette.

Then for two years the family held its breath, waiting for Dawson to return. He claimed
it was all about jumping, and probably it was, when he decided to join the Fifth Group
Special Forces in 1968, a unit that had taken so many casualties that the qualification
protocol to wear a Green Beret had been sidelined in favor of the expediency of warm
bodies, jailbirds welcome, we’ll redefine crazy ass for you, and the missions were
the same ones he had been doing all along, the faces were the same, civilian and military,
except now instead of training commandos to jump he was one of the warriors stepping
out into the air fifteen hundred feet above the drop zone, nursing a desire to kill
somebody to even the score for the friends he had been unable to haul back up into
the air alive or unmaimed.