The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (60 page)

Nobody handed you a script, said Ben. You have a weakness for improvisation.

A dark genius for impersonating your inner Sandy, Sammy agreed.

Anyway, said Coleman, unruffled. First, some backstory. With the demise of the Medellin
cartel, and the apparent weakening of the Cali syndicate, what we’ve been seeing is
a shift of organizational and operational capabilities to the north, by which I mean
Central America and, more pertinently, Mexico. We are at this time observing what
still must be categorized as a transitional period, which, in the provenance of drug
lords means a period of flux and anarchy. There’s a cumulative effect we’re observing,
as the small-time operators step in and eventually are assimilated and consolidated—or
annihilated—by more ambitious but still nascent organizations, primarily in Mexico,
primarily on the Gulf Coast, with more manpower and more rapacity and more political
clout, who have seen the future and staked a claim. Okay? Back to Haiti.

First, why Haiti? Answer: a lawless state with imminently corruptible functionaries
and an unguarded coastline within striking distance of the United States. A slam dunk,
as they say. Why specifically Le Cap? For all those same reasons but with a bonus
ingredient—one of the world’s foremost traffickers in the opium trade and heroin just
so happened to be in Cap-Haïtien, exercising nominal jurisdiction of the northern
districts under the auspices of a United Nations mandate, and in accordance with the
nature of his entrepreneurial personality, exploring the business environment, researching
the players, and essentially testing the waters for expanding his own geographically
specific activity into an enterprise with significant outreach, an entity that would
function more like a global conglomerate.

Agent Coleman, said the undersecretary with a low whistle of appreciation. Is that
what a country boy sounds like after he comes home from a Rhodes Scholarship?

I’m from Oklahoma, Coleman explained for the captain’s benefit.

You’re talking about Khan! said Eville, aghast, kicking himself for his deficiency,
his lack of situational awareness.

Yes, of course, said Coleman. Who else but Colonel Rashid Khan? What we all want to
determine is why? Personal wealth? Khan is a rich man, yet we all know rich men never
know when to stop making themselves richer men. And, since his illicit activity has
back-channel approval by his C & C structures in Islamabad, we should ask ourselves,
is there another motive that is not so obvious as greed and regional power? At the
moment I would argue that the answer is not available. How might it make itself available?
I would also argue that we have made a good start on narrowing and, with the evidence
at hand, eliminating some of the variables.

One thing we know, said the undersecretary. The colonel is one of the best liars on
this earth.

Eville found himself half-listening, mesmerized by the choreography of Coleman’s fingers
bouncing over the large brown envelope that had replaced the plate in front of him.
The limber, flexing troupe arrived at a suspense-filled pause, the fingers poised
to lunge upon the envelope’s metal clasp. So, said Coleman, an unexpected character
appears on the stage of the production in Cap-Haïtien. Who is he, why has he come?
At first, no one seems to know. The fingers shucked back toward the clasp and unbent
its flanges, removing the envelope’s contents, a thin sheaf of eight-by-ten black-and-white
photographs, the top image a portrait of a darkly handsome white man, his features
faintly swarthy and cunning and his expression animated by a roguish charm. The man’s
name, Coleman told them, was Parmentier.

He looks Jewish, said Ben. Is he a Jew? What are we dealing with here? Mossad?

Coleman needed only a minute to exhaust his knowledge of Parmentier —a Cajun from
Louisiana, a petty thief and addict who was lucid enough and smart enough to earn
underworld credibility as a dealer in New Orleans, gaining the trust of the city’s
crime bosses and flirting with the local mafia, which helped him relocate to Boston
after some unpleasant business involving narcotics took him off the streets, the leniency
of the sentence a result of outrageously expensive lawyers and a sealed plea bargain
that seemed to infer he would be offering his services to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Next stop Tampa, where Parmentier seems to have rendered the promised service to the
Bureau in a rather reckless manner. His movements after the Tampa sting are not entirely
clear, said Coleman. What is clear, though, he said, flipping over the top photograph
to reveal the one underneath, a waist-up image of Parmentier and Colonel Khan, standing
in front of the colonel’s white UN-provided SUV, engaged in conversation, is that
he came to Haiti, to Cap-Haïtien, where it appears he made a new friend and perhaps
a new associate.

Time frame? asked Ben. Before the ship?

After, said Coleman. The product had already left the country. Perhaps its arrival
in the States reminded Parmentier’s people of Haiti’s potential. That’s a guess but
a good one. Parmentier is likely representing Mexican interests who are capitalized
to some extent by interests in New Orleans, though I can’t document that. But let’s
assume it’s true. We still have to ask ourselves, what’s in it for our Colonel Khan?
Short-term skimming? He’s in town, he’s the sheriff, he takes his ten percent, he
rides on, end of story. So okay, said Coleman, flipping to the next photograph. This
was taken a few days ago. Anyone want to speculate?

Who took these pictures? asked Burnette, already figuring it out, glancing not at
Coleman but at Chambers who said, You didn’t underestimate her, did you, Ev?

No, sir, said Burnette, and there was no more mention of the undersecretary’s daughter.

The third photograph suggested the possibility of another ripening mystery, Parmentier
and Colonel Khan together at the shabby porticoed entrance to an art gallery in downtown
Port-au-Prince. Let’s assume they’re not collectors, said Coleman, flipping to the
fourth and final photograph in the sheaf. This guy, he said, the pink moon of his
fingernail tapping the platinum Levantine head of the man in the portrait, is the
gallery’s owner.

Always a pleasure working with you, Sandy, said Undersecretary Chambers, standing
up from the table. Sandy said he forgot to mention the creation of a Haiti task force
at the Treasury Department, a most undesired development—competition, interference,
cross-purposes, hoarding, premature ejaculation, bureaucratic infighting and all the
liabilities of a turf war—and Chambers told him not to worry about it, W
e’ll pump in smoke
. Then he instructed Captain Burnette to take the clubs out of the cart and ferry
Agent Coleman back to the clubhouse, which Burnette did, and the Friends of Golf sauntered
over to the tenth and teed up and played on.

CHAPTER FORTY

An unsettling shapelessness seemed to wash in on Burnette, a sluggish but relentless
tide of gloom. His sense of direction and larger purpose blurred; the bona fides that
formed a protective casing around his identity felt pocked and friable and he had
begun to think it was possible he had lost his bearings, that he had been dropped
into some barren worthless place he had never been before, without any recognizable
landmarks, without so much as a north star to lead him out again and home. Whatever
he had to report to the Friends of Golf about Haiti or the knavery and dereliction
of the Pakistani colonel or his assessment of the field performance of the undersecretary’s
daughter had remained unsolicited and unsaid, a debriefing in search of an audience,
and he had to guess his value to these men was either negligible or, improbably, overlooked.

And yet at the same time he felt strangely upheld by a countervailing force, the sharp
attention paid to the details of his movement and support, an unfamiliar luxury of
methodical thinking applied to his individual but lesser needs, a diametrically opposite
pattern for how any military looked at and accommodated a single human being, as though
he had undergone a metamorphosis into a more elite but insubstantial caste, less collective
but also less productive, a more symbolic level of existence, an aristocrat without
a grand calling, separate and privileged but essentially useless, attended to by an
invisible network that anticipated the meaningless requirements of his day with astounding
clairvoyance.

That afternoon in April, after he and Sanders Coleman had returned the golf cart to
a Pinehurst staffer, an ordinary man stepped out of his ordinary car in the drive,
hailed Burnette, and waited for him to check out of his room and then took him to
the Moore County Airport in the nearby Sandhills. He drove Burnette onto the tarmac
and parked next to a little bird—a red-and-white Bell 44—and, like the chauffeur in
Miami, handed Eville a clipboard with papers prepared for his signature. Burnette
asked what they were and the guy said finance docs and a speak-no-evil form and gave
the captain a new credit card and a second card printed with a cryptonym (for Agency
use only), access code, and password for another account opened in his name at a bank
in the Bahamas. What’s this for? asked Burnette and the man said, You’re asking
me
? Whatever you do, don’t file on it. All right, said Burnette, scanning the secrecy
oath, which identified his updated TS security clearance, then scrawled his name at
the bottom of the page.

What’s level five? he asked and the guy said there was no level six. Burnette said,
What’s yours? and the guy told him three, see-no-evil, and he got out and strapped
himself into the cockpit of the helo and before Eville knew it he was back at the
Green Ramp at Pope, hitching a ride to Fort Bragg and his off-post town house, where
his footsteps reverberated in the late-afternoon glare of uncurtained nothingness.
He took an aggravated inventory of the shabby crap his wife had left behind—a veneer-nicked
dresser, a yard-sale recliner, a folding chair, an old TV with rabbit-ears antennae,
dust-covered stacks of several dozen books on the living room floor, a table setting
for one but no table, a coffee mug with a Special Forces decal, a pot for boiling
and a pan for frying, sugar packets from McDonalds, surplus moving cartons. Nothing
in the bedroom but his weight-lifting bench and barbell and iron discs and, in the
bedroom closet, his rack of uniforms and meager supply of civvies and, pushed to the
corners, his personal cache of weapons and fly rods, boots and running shoes, and
two wooden apple crates holding framed desktop pictures and photo albums of his beloved
and the accumulated miscellany of a soldier’s life. It almost felt like too much,
just by the sad weight of its being so little.

On the kitchen counter next to the cliché of unopened bills he found the note she
had penned in February—
Ev, I’m sorry, I just hated watching everything get smaller. Take care, xo Cheryl
—and he picked up the wall phone to call the firm where she had planted her tiny flag
in the world as a paralegal and stood listening to the deadness in the line until
he understood it as a mercy. He knew the immediate choice was to stay there and wallow
in the misery hole of his lonesome domain or get out and so he located the keys to
his truck and got out, driving over to the base, parking in the lot at Third Group
and sitting there for a moment, disoriented, watching the snake-eaters come and go
in their BDUs and Girl Scout caps, unsure of the many things that now confronted him
as they had not before—Should he report to his old company or continue on to the compound
where the D-boys assembled? Should he be in uniform or street clothes? Did he know
enough now to know if he pussied out of Delta he would nevertheless live happily ever
after among the brethren of an A-team, or would he kick himself down the road of his
life for being a back-away slink, a quitter, not up to handling the full experience?
At this point was it even possible to hit the reverse button, cancel the offshore
accounts, sever his ties with Chambers and his cohort of overlords, and rewind the
tape to where his ambitions were sweet fine dreams of higher callings but still only
dreams, idle and weightless and not much more, prodding the drudge of a day’s work,
where
someday
was a story you made end however you pleased and not a confusing, potentially self-defeating
reality in which you always played the weakhearted moron who blew it, a defeat made
manifest by the poverty of your own character.

But he scolded himself then because he was a soldier who had never thought to ask
himself how far is far enough.
Forward
wasn’t a compass point as much as a vow. Therein lay his father’s lesson—the intrepid
never yearn, they fly right past on their way to the getting done. He scolded himself
for trying to make sense of the layered shit of Haiti, one cover atop another stacked
atop another, its pointlessness and contradictions, the totally fucked-up cast of
characters, the setups he should have seen coming from a mile away, the intrigues
right in front of his eyes that he never noticed come together into the switch-out.
The amorphous mission—blob, not creep—had warped his mind and misaligned his thoughts
and left him groaning inwardly with some genuine existential soulburn.

He let it all churn a few minutes longer until he had reduced the problem to a single
lazy cause, blaming the girl for everything but for no better reason than the fact
that she rattled him to his core. There wasn’t enough training in the world to teach
him how to get it right with Jackie—she made him feel bad about himself, dulled and
inferior in a way he never imagined. That alone was what was so hard to let go and
everything he disliked and mistrusted about her had vectored into play the last time
they were together in the north, before she removed herself to the capital near the
end of March.

She hadn’t connected with him for a few weeks and he let himself believe he had seen
the last of her. Then she was there one evening at dinnertime, sitting down at his
table at the Christophe, wearing a robe-like white cotton dress identical to the ones
he had seen on a choir of Haitian Pentecostals, hymn singers gathered like egrets
by the water on Sunday nights. Jackie said she needed him and he said what’s up and
she told him she had been invited to a ceremony out in the countryside and she could
go alone but having an escort would be the wiser course. I want to know more, he said
warily, trying to read behind the appeal of her good-natured smiling, the untrustworthy
display of innocence, and she told him there was a religious service near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord
worth checking out and he assumed she meant evangelicals and church and agreed to
take her in his banged-up CUCV, a handed-down Chevy Blazer from the US military to
the blue caps.

It was a fragrant, beautiful sundown drive past cane fields and sweet potato plots
and peasants moving steadfast toward a peaceful end to their day. They traveled down
a paved road lined by cacao groves and breadfruit trees and the feathery plumage of
coco palms, the air warmed and dreamy with the aroma of woodsmoke and burnt sugar
and orange blossoms, the unhurried long procession of humanity along the shoulders
like a stroll of neighborly souls as the CUCV motored past respectfully in low gear,
the only vehicle on the darkening lane.

On the ride in, Jackie seemed a wiser, chastened version of herself, shorn of the
aggressive snip of sarcasm, even her camera put aside for the night, surprising Eville
with her straightforward and sometimes unguarded reply to his cautious efforts to
chat her up. She had stood down, he thought, retired her out-there hard-boiled Agency
persona for a few hours and allowed him short glimpses of her bedrock sane self, a
rational being named Dottie. Oh, she said with a soft thoughtfulness, when he asked,
not expecting any honesty, why she had chosen to make herself such an active participant
in her father’s black universe and everything that path implied. Well, she said quietly,
explaining her sedition against her parents had run its course.

I had my little rebellion against it, believe me, she said. You can ask, but trust
me, it was all a prodigious bore. I was meant to do this, I was schooled in the trade.
It could have been my brother, but he was timid, so it was me. Her father thought
the males of her generation were more willing to let things go, to just forget about
it, but females were less forgiving of that that was unforgivable. My dad says females
are elephants, she said. He believes people who don’t crave justice and vengeance
are empty, that there’s something vital missing from their spirit. I have my father’s
commitments, she said. Things are not unclear. He asked her then about schooling but
she only told him her degrees—her undergraduate work at Yale in Islamic studies—
living in Turkey, you know, piqued my interest
—and a masters in ethnobotany at Harvard and he didn’t have a clue what ethnobotany
was. A lot of stuff, traditional medicine and altered consciousness and those areas,
she told him, but ultimately, for me, she said, it was about primitive forms of biological
warfare. You’re messing with me again, he said, and she laughed merrily and said,
Oh, come on now, Captain, have I ever? and when he thought about it, he flashed on
Iraq and Desert Storm, enclosing his existence into a hazmat moon suit, and saw the
logic, if not the motivation, behind how she had paired her studies.

I suppose that makes sense, he said, except when I try to plug it in to what you’re
doing here in Haiti.

I’m doing research, she said. I’m learning. Let’s talk about something else.

They continued on for a while without words and he impulsively asked if he could ask
her something personal and went ahead and asked without consent.

Do you trust your father?

I trust my father’s cruelty, she said.

What’s that mean?

I don’t know, she said. It seemed the truest thing to say.

Then she said when they crossed the bridge ahead to slow down and go left and he turned
off the paved surface onto a dirt track that followed a river he could hear but not
see. They drove until darkness closed in, deeper into the bush, where the air began
to pulse and he bent his head toward his open window, listening to the faint beat.
Drums? he said, and the volume of the drumming swelled and then, farther on, pressed
like thunder into his skull as they arrived at a clearing teeming with peasants. He
killed the blinding offense of the CUCV’s headlights but not before the drums fell
silent and the beams froze a tableau of heaving dancers in the yard of a mud-walled
farmhouse. Then all was blackness with stabs of flame from rag-wick torches and above
the thatched roof a rosy slosh of sparking light from an unseen bonfire blazing behind
the house. And centered in that arc of radiance, on rough-hewn flagpoles flew the
rippled standards of a
houngan,
a sight Burnette knew fairly well. When she had told him
ceremony,
he should have known right off what she had meant. White-eyed silhouettes surged
forward to engulf the vehicle. Say again, you’re invited, right? he said, groping
the cuff of his pants for his ankle holster and sidearm. Jackie said, Yeah, trying
to push her door open against the gaggle of bodies swarmed against it. I think we’re
like the guests of honor.

After all the time he had logged with his A-team in the time-lost hinterlands of Haiti,
he was inured to this, the sweaty glistening clamor of faceless humanity in the middle
of the night, the raised chorus of anonymous voices and the ambiguity of their passions,
never sorted out until you finally identified a ringleader or appointed a spokesman.
The Americans were there to breach the villagers’ barrier of fear, behind which they
cowered and behind which they suffered.
Yet
vodou
was no Halloween trick in Haiti, although it made some of the team members piss their
pants to contain their laughter, just as it gave others the creeps.
What’s the problem here? Werewolves,
would come the answer.
What’s the problem here? A witch placed a curse on my sister. What’s the problem here?
A devil has taken possession of the dog.
Burnette and the team would nod grimly, stifling their amusement or disgust, at each
fantastic fairy-tale account of supernatural mischief. They snapped off the tips of
their chem-lites and swabbed phosphorescent crucifixes
over the thresholds of families with infants, to ward off werewolves who would come
at night to steal the children’s souls. They’d track down the witch and put the fear
of the Lord into her until the jealous scheming hag lifted the curse
.
They’d put a bullet into the heads of the devil-dogs, foaming with rabies. Sometimes
it felt as though they had stepped back into a shroud-misted ancestral past to the
birthplace of psy ops. As far as Burnette was concerned the
vodou
dramas were fascinations and part fun and gave him the blood-thrill of a medieval
rush, summoning visions of Beowulf and Grendel, men who were giants and women who
were swans and the venerable age-old tactic of magic on the battlefield.