The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (56 page)

Thank you, sir. Permission to speak. What’s this medal for?

Damn, you’re an impertinent shit, the colonel snarled, feigning offense. I don’t fucking
know, Top Sergeant Burnette. Distinguished Zoo Keeper. The Kabuki Cross. What would
you like it to be? A Purple Heart?

No, sir.

No, sir?

I haven’t earned a Purple Heart, sir.

You are correct, Top Sergeant. But you will, isn’t that right?

I have mixed feelings about being shot, sir.

You want this medal or not?

No, sir.

Correct answer. Top, let me tell you why you don’t want this medal.

The colonel’s rawboned fingers unpinned the clasp and removed the medal from the soldier’s
breast and sailed it out toward a duck pond behind the tee and explained that unless
a man wore the uniform of his country, medals were a useless foppery.

How do you feel about that, Top? Being a man without a uniform?

Bewildered and uncomprehending, sir.

That it? That’s your state of mind?

Aggravated, said Burnette, unclenching his teeth just enough to eject the single word
from the herd of expletives stampeding his tongue, but apparently it was the funniest
word he ever uttered, triggering a wheezing explosion of laughter from the Friends
of Golf, the colonel himself rubescent with mirth,
hee-hee
ing the bray of a fat lady. A reliably enjoyable moment, good fun, fucking with a
subordinate’s mind. Okay, I get it, said Burnette, restraining a smile. This had been
a jest, a type of court amusement, and he cheered up, allowing himself to imagine
being tasked to babysit Steven Chambers’s daughter would prove to be still another
one of their pranks.

Okay, at ease, said the colonel, extending his hand for a congratulatory shake. Burnette,
welcome to Delta.

Sir? Is that possible?

Anything’s possible, Top. You want in, you’re in.

The colonel never bothered to tee off on the second hole but walked with Undersecretary
Chambers and Burnette down the fairway, briefing the soldier on the blackened peculiarities
of his new mission, which would not switch on without sweeping up one more day’s manure
from the old mission, some mysterious crisis with a freighter and its crew held hostage
in Gonaïves. The State Department and the DEA were interested in getting this thing
resolved, said the colonel. Fucking nonsense but take care of it tomorrow and then
I want you on this other thing, this Jacques Lecoeur thing, and keep in mind you work
for us, just the undersecretary and me and not that goddamn godless Pakistani colonel
down there, one more blue-cap pissant crawled out from the sewer of his own country,
looking to put some notches in his belt. Another thing, the colonel said, start growing
your hair out now. How about a mustache? Beards I can live without. And stop at Walmart
or one of those places on your way back to Homestead and buy yourself some civvies.

Ev, the undersecretary told him as they all gathered again at the second green for
a farewell, you can give me my bag back now.

The colonel requisitioned the electric cart from Ben and Sammy and chauffeured his
newest recruit back to the clubhouse, explaining the protocol Burnette needed to follow
subsequent to his special assignment in Haiti. I want to see you at Bragg, he said,
parking the cart in the driveway near the main entrance next to a town car with government
plates, where an army major sat waiting for him with the engine running. We bring
you inside the fence, said the colonel, do an official selection, run you through
some indoctrination courses, cut you with knives, upgrade your killer’s license.

You ever killed anybody, Top?

No, sir. Well, maybe. It was the Gulf War. The gooks were too far away to confirm
kills.

What are your languages?

Spanish. Creole
. . .
well, some.

Worthless shit, said the colonel. We’ll get you speaking some sand nigger
—Dari, Arabic, Pashto. You’re going to need those before this is all over.

I look forward to it, sir, said Burnette, wondering what the man was talking about.

They have a spa in there, the colonel said, pointing at the clubhouse as he got out
of the cart. You ever been to a spa, Top? You ought to try it sometime—get yourself
a facial, pedicure, hot stones on your spine, get one of those herbal rubdowns. And
listen, between you and me, the colonel said, keep a tight leash on the undersecretary’s
daughter. She was a rookie just off the Farm at Fort Lee, he confided, where she had
managed to gain a reputation as a bit of a wildcat.

Yes, sir, Burnette said, watching the colonel disappear into the Doral. He tried not
to think about how this day had become a watermark for strange in his life, the elevation
to Delta Force delivered to him in the guise of a practical joke. He opened the passenger
door to a blast of air-conditioned relief and sat down sighing, addled with elation.
The major behind the wheel tossed a clipboard of paperwork onto his lap, reached over
to give him a ballpoint pen, and said,
Sign
. Burnette scanned the first document and sucked in oxygen and looked at the major.

Hold the phone, I’m a captain now?

Looks like it, said the major, retrieving the signed paperwork and issuing Burnette
a federal concealed-weapons permit, a corporate credit card—Omega Systems—from a bank
in the Cayman Islands, and an envelope nine-months pregnant with twenty-dollar bills.

The next thing Master Sergeant Eville Burnette knows he’s back in Haiti getting his
forehead split by some coked-up banshee in Gonaïves and then he’s Mister Burnette
with UN press credentials hanging off his sweaty neck, up in the mountains with the
girl and Tom Harrington, who was not so bad for a do-gooder, one of the few so-called
humanitarians he befriended in Haiti who reserved a dram of their flooding compassion
for the boots on the ground. How much the lawyer understood he had been cultivated
as a pawn in other people’s schemes, Burnette did not know, but it made him ache to
see Harrington at this moment of dark enlightenment, crushed by his own naïveté, realizing
his role in the northern mountains was to sow betrayal and be himself betrayed, and
then the girl is a whirling tigress with eyes sealed shut in pain and he hits her
and she crumples to the ground. It’s Harrington who kneels over her while she gags
and chokes and Eville Burnette punctures the trachea of the strangling Haitian and
he’s swearing to himself,
It should never go beyond this,
meaning his deal with the undersecretary and his daughter, and yet it does.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

In the twilight, the Blackhawk became consumed by a cloud of rancid dust as the pilot
put the helicopter down as close as he could to the medical tent inside the UN base
in Cap-Haïtien. Jackie was first out the door and Burnette would not see her again
until the following morning. Then the operation’s tardy air support, a Chinook and
a second Blackhawk, returned after their sweep through the mountains with their ignominious
haul—the dead (three, including Jacques Lecoeur), the wounded (four, one of them an
eight-year-old girl), the detainees, twenty-three in all, men, women, and children.
Not a single blue cap with so much as a scratch. Lucky man, the twenty-fourth detainee
was Lecoeur’s second-in-command, Ti Phillipe, in surgery at that very moment to repair
and close Burnette’s hasty field tracheotomy. Seeing the dead rolled out in zippered
body bags, it occurred to Eville that the undersecretary’s daughter had, in all likelihood,
saved Phillipe’s life when she almost killed him with a gullet full of pepper spray.

Burnette had then made the mistake of trotting after the Pakistani colonel and grabbing
his upper arm as he exited the chopper and swaggered toward a Humvee waiting to return
him across the strip to quarters. What happened up there, colonel? he demanded, trying
to control his breathing, which was how he controlled his anger, which was why he
wasn’t behind bars somewhere. What the hell did you do?

Digging out his yellow earplugs, Khan spun around into his face, enraged. To whom
am I speaking, sir? he demanded, bellowing at first before dropping his voice into
a lower but more sinister range of sarcasm. A journalist? A soldier? To the first
I answer, the United Nations Pakistani attachment has successfully engaged and quelled
the activities of a murderous band of reactionaries threatening the stability of the
host nation. To the second I answer, you are insubordinate, my friend. You are impudent.
And, should I say, a hypocrite? If you have an objection to my command, the colonel
jeered, I want it written and submitted, and I trust it will include an explanation
of your own role—and allow me to express my gratitude here and now—in our mission.

Look, sir, I’d just like to know. These people? They stayed in the forest, hiding.
They were rabbits. Sir.

Excuse me, it was my understanding you were provided to us by your army as a field
advisor. For reasons you perhaps know better than I. The operation was a success,
Captain. Wouldn’t you agree?

No, he would not, but he backed off the open confrontation, the impossibility of anything
being resolved beyond his duty to obey. Colonel Rashid Khan, his ego inflated with
carnage, killing, and murder, the mastermind and hero of the bushwhack in the mountains,
saluted and Eville returned the salute and the colonel took his seat in the Humvee,
leaning out to call Eville back over to issue further orders. After the International
Police Monitors from Caricom had sorted out the detainees, the colonel told him, he
expected the captain to monitor their interrogations.

Out on the helipad the next morning, Burnette noticed a taxi stopped at the chain-link
gates to the restricted area and groaned and cursed to himself as he watched Jackie
Scott flash her identification and be allowed through on foot and come toward the
choppers, fiddling with her badass camera before she fixed it to her right eye and
started shooting. He started to walk away, back to base headquarters to update the
situational report he had cyber-filed last night with his chain of command at Bragg,
still not understanding that there was very little chain left in the matter of whom
he was obliged to answer to these days, when she dropped the camera and called to
him.

Eville, wait, she said in a neutral voice, neither demanding nor upset by the obvious
bloody consequence of their deceit. What happened?

He kept pounding on for several more steps but found he couldn’t ignore her and stopped
and stomped back until he was in her face. Why don’t you tell me? he said.

I left the mountains when you did, she said. You forced me onto the helicopter, remember?
Otherwise, I’d know, wouldn’t I?

You know what, he said. Right about now I’m doing the best I can not to smack you
again.

Hey, I knew what you knew, okay, she said, self-contained and formidable, stepping
brazenly forward into his threat. So, go fuck yourself, man.

Their hostility enclosed them in a sickening bubble of mutual contempt that prevented
either of them from being aware of the SUV speeding their way until it had slammed
its brakes, honking superfluously for their attention, and Tom Harrington, almost
in tears, was flying out the door on the driver’s side, taking in the scene, the dead,
the wounded, the flex-cuffed huddle of ragged prisoners left to sit in the dirt throughout
the night. Then Harrington, wheeling on the two of them with a fire hose of accusations,
was eviscerated by Jackie’s calm autopsy of Tom’s innocence. She pointed at his vehicle,
the smashed windows, the bent front bumper and dented fender, and asked him where
the huge splatter of blood had gone that she had seen in the parking lot as she left
the hotel that morning.
I hit a dog, okay,
Harrington yelled back, flustered and unconvincing.
Yeah, you hit something,
Jackie agreed. Eville stole a sidelong glance at the vehicle and had to admit it
was pretty messed up. In a faintly heckling manner, she reminded Tom that his own
freely confided purpose in interviewing Jacques Lecoeur had been to determine, at
the behest of unknown benefactors, if Lecoeur and his men were still operating on
yesterday’s agenda, the good guys versus bad guys program that was counterproductive
to a liberated Haiti, or, just as bad, were freedom fighters who had dissembled into
a gang of bandits.
Am I right?
she taunted.
Did I get it wrong?
Watching her performance, Eville found her undue confidence breathtaking, her implied
assertion that she was disconnected from events and blameless. She wanted to make
it clear to Harrington that she didn’t really give much of a shit about any of these
issues as long as she could continue to do her job, which meant take her pictures
without the interference of self-appointed censors. When she paused for a breath,
perhaps for Round Two, Harrington exploded.

Master Sergeant Burnette, Tom Harrington’s rant spewed on, I don’t know what the fuck
you’re doing up here out of uniform with this psycho cunt—and everything the guy said
Eville felt he had coming and it pained and discouraged him, having someone he honestly
liked and respected, a civilian no less, vilify him and question his honor, but Harrington’s
tirade began to spiral and break apart in midair when he returned his outrage to the
girl, readjusting his aim to her career, her sorry-ass future as a member of the press,
making threats that he had no possible idea were ineffectual and quickly tiresome.
In Eville’s recollection of the scene, she had looked right at him with a dispassionate
self-knowledge that was heartless and without mercy and asked, with what he could
only describe as supernatural blitheness,
Where do you go around here to report a rape?

Harrington lunged at her and Eville was compelled to intercept him, although he would
have taken an immoderate pleasure in stepping aside and letting the two of them have
at it, the primal male thing sunk in his brain stem curious to see how far Harrington
would go. But he grabbed Tom, not roughly but with enough force to edge him back from
the disaster of assaulting Jackie, who stood there with her hips cocked and arms folded,
mocking both of them,
All the big bad men who get off hitting women,
and he jockeyed Tom back to his battered SUV while Tom pleaded with him,
Who is she, man? Who the fuck is she? I thought you were one of the guys in the white
hats, Eville,
and what other option did he have but to lie to Harrington and swear he didn’t know
her. Eville nudged and persuaded him back into the SUV, where Tom’s hands trembled
on the steering wheel and he dropped his head as tears skipped down his face and he
confessed he thought he had hit someone on the road that night at a barricade, coming
out of the mountains.
I couldn’t stop, man. It would have been suicide.
He drove off, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Eville heard he had gone
over to headquarters to have it out with Colonel Khan, who refused to see him, and
had left the north soon afterward, and soon after that had withdrawn altogether from
the never-ending travails and tribulations of Haiti.

Burnette went back to speak with Jackie before heading to his assigned cubicle on
the base where he could hook up his encrypted laptop and try to make sense of things
to anybody in the States who might be listening. She had volleyed the first words,
dismissing the drama in its entirety by defining Tom Harrington.
He thinks he’s so much better than us,
she said.
He thinks he’s Mister Clean
.
The go-to guy for moral intervention. The halo’s a bit much, don’t you think?

But it had been easy to read her face when she garroted the lawyer’s conscience—she
was bluffing—and it had not been difficult either to read the wretched expression
of Harrington’s reaction—something had happened between her and Tom, and she had emerged
from the encounter with aces to play for leverage.

So, he said, you’re saying he raped you?

Did I say that? she said, unaffected by his curtness. For the first time that morning
looking at her face he registered the fact that she had attempted to apply makeup
to camouflage the bruise he had telegrammed her the day before. Did you hear me say
that? She smiled with a sparking trace of wickedness in her captivating blue eyes,
a bratty chime to her words, and Eville imagined that as for the fate of the undersecretary’s
daughter, he was beyond caring. There was nothing he found fundamentally right with
her, nothing trustworthy or exculpatory—she was, instead, a human isotope. Every reproach
earned the lash of her ridicule, every attempt to advise or help was rejected with
juvenile recalcitrance, if not fury. At the same time, there was something too methodic
about her intensity, a practiced sense of routine, as if she had been taught, or self-taught,
to escalate the psychodrama, which of course was nonsense, because any training in
black tradecraft taught you to cool down, not heat up. There seemed to be a fault
line at her core, two different plates of the self, slammed together in perpetual
grating that he could fairly guess would one day crack and heave and devastate.

And yet. That morning when her attitude morphed and reassembled in a transparent zone
of seduction, his mind was disgusted while his body seemed to muster the minimal amount
of forgiveness necessary to agree, tentatively, if he could make it—
yeah, right—
to meet her for dinner that night. Maybe, she said, they could get back into their
own groove, like the other night on the veranda at the Oloffson. What he found so
hard to parse though was that nobody, as far as Eville could determine, was exploiting
Jackie; her behavior was unilateral—there was no one she had to defend herself against.
On the contrary, he would continue to see, she was snatching up anybody who wandered
into her orbit, which was A-plus behavior for the sneaky-Pete lot, but he generally
had trouble thinking of her as an agency spook, and second generation, for Chrissakes,
carrying forth some scary family tradition into the Darwinian future. True, there
was nothing fragile about her, certainly an eye-catching trait for recruiters and
trainers; undoubtedly she could and would launch herself like a wolverine into the
fray, but then, he was learning too slowly, count on Jackie to throw an inner switch
and reverse direction, her caprice jerking you around in your seat with a sort of
highly engineered, clutch-burning torque of bipolar whiplash. She did not court his
allegiance, not at all, although she summoned it cat-and-mouse-style, only to bat
it away. There was nothing she seemed to desperately need except to screw with everybody,
her game always the superior game.

It was an awakening of sorts for Captain Burnette, an acidic epiphany that seemed
long overdue and willfully delayed—his complicity in the deaths and injury of innocent
people, the casualties by no means collateral damage in what was by no stretch of
the imagination a war or its attendant fog. And nobody cared. Poor and starving and
nobody cared made more sense than gunned down and nobody cared, not counting Tom Harrington,
for the little that was worth. The detainees themselves beseeching in their misery
toward the shabby men, their captors, who considered themselves no more exalted than
herders and therefore, logically, considered these pathetic specimens of humanity
no more human than goats. He thought at first it was Haiti but he would come to know
otherwise—the planet was chock full of expendable people, overflowing with targets,
and genocide an organic event, as common as a wheat harvest. That day on the base
his afternoon had not improved, helping a contingent of Jamaican police sort out the
prisoners and stumble through a series of basic interrogations before they were locked
up for the night, simply trying to identify who these people were, the base translator’s
English not up to the job, Eville himself not up to the chaos and caterwauling, and
he had arrived for dinner deeply distracted and brooding, in a dark state of mind
that she put up with mostly not at all.

What is with this resentment? Jackie said within seconds of his ordering a bottle
of beer. What did I do to you exactly? He could have said but didn’t, Hey, get over
it, not everything’s about you, because in a way so far everything had been about
her, not directly, of course, yet her involvement seemed difficult to separate from
every jump in a situation from standard to calamitous. But after a couple beers, he
leveled out and could see how his shitty mood was exaggerating her influence, her
negative force field.