The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (68 page)

Her reaction is airy and cavalier and she tells him she’s there with Gerard and her
husband Parmentier’s up in New Orleans on business but will be flying back to Port-au-Prince
in the morning (Eville knows every one of these details). Ti Phillipe talks big, she
says to Burnette, and Honore Vincent detests me, he’s jealous not to mention insane.
She wanted to attend a sacrifice ceremony and had to pay a bundle for it, and I didn’t
choose him, she tells Burnette, I chose the priest here in Saint-Marc, his arch enemy,
but hey, relax and enjoy the show, she says, Honore will not show his face here, this
is not his turf, these are not his people, and he would never come this far south
to fuck with somebody he could fuck with up north with a lot less effort, but by the
end of her reasonings Burnette is only convinced that the hit is not a joke—which
is truly messed up, Phillipe’s hit on Renee competing with his own. Reginald and Scarecrow
come back from their recon with nothing to report and Burnette sends them out front
to watch the road. Then it’s late in the afternoon, the crowd’s drunk and raucous,
the bulls have been beheaded with a great pulsing outpour of blood, skinned and disemboweled
and quartered and hacked into purple chunks, people shoving and clamoring for a piece,
the fire lit like a bomb, leaping up in a sheet of red flame and showering sparks,
his teeth are rattling from the drums—and now cue the shit, cue the fan.

He might have expected a heads-up from his boys on the road, but suddenly the woman
says to Burnette with cool amazement, Oh, my God, there’s Honore Vincent, and Burnette
looks and this jumbo-assed black guy is coming their way with wild-eyed ferocity,
the crowd parting to let him pass, and Burnette wants confirmation from Renee,
You’re absolutely sure?
and Renee seems puzzled, not by his identity but by his audacious presence, and Burnette
yells out the monster’s name as a question,
Honore Vincent?
but gets no reaction, just an unbroken deliberate stride of sheer menace, not a threat
one needs to stand back and ascertain. Burnette can smell the alcohol, the guy’s been
bathing in
clairin,
he’s like some android demon programmed to reach through a brick wall for Renee’s
throat, the all-powerful
gros neg
come to teach a lesson to the world’s white bitches. He steps in front of Renee to
shield her from the assault but Renee instantly switches places, herself perhaps a
gros neg
stuck in a puny woman’s body, and at the same moment she boots Honore Vincent’s scrotum
into his spleen and bends him over, Burnette hops aboard trying to wrench Vincent’s
arms behind his back and ends up riding him for a short distance until they topple
to the ground, Burnette flipped underneath the monster and into a stranglehold until
Renee seizes his flailing leg to release his sidearm from its ankle holster and cracks
the brute into semiconsciousness with one flat-sided swing, at which point Burnette
heaves and Vincent releases and Burnette rolls over and pins Vincent’s wrists behind
his back to get the cuffs on.

The thing could have gone better but okay, it’s done, and now Burnette realizes he
and Vincent are at the center of a surging uproar, surrounded by a shrieking mob and
it’s not clear what component of the spectacle has them so inflamed but the sight
of a white man beating the tar out of a black man in Haiti has never qualified as
a dependable crowd-pleaser. Renee’s being jostled in the frenzy but she’s still holding
the gun and doesn’t seem concerned and then a man, not old but resembling something
smoked over a brazier, is standing next to her, a skinny little guy wearing white
pajamas and a
houngan
’s
crimson sash—this is Bòkò St. Jean—and St. Jean says,
Shoot him,
and Burnette, with dumb innocence, asks Why? and the old wizard says,
He serves the devil.
He brings the devil here.

The crowd cheers the verdict of their priest but Burnette retrieves the pistol from
Renee and says, Maybe next time, and hauls the dazed Honore Vincent to his feet, keeping
one hand in the waistband of the giant’s pants as he wrestles him through the crowd
and out to the road, wondering Where the fuck are my boys? prepared to fire upon anybody
who approaches with a hint of Mexican in the family tree, and he’s pushing Vincent
down the middle of the road in the direction of Saint-Marc when he sees two vehicles:
the Brazilian’s SUV and the Mexican’s black SUV, and there’s Scarecrow and there’s
Reginald in the middle of a shouting match with four members of Saint-Marc’s finest,
on a patrol out of the city to check out the big party.

Reginald spots him coming down the road with Vincent and says something that Burnette
can’t hear, something like,
Look, here comes the boss,
because the police turn to look, saucer-eyed, and by the time he gets there, the
cops are rambunctious, their guns drawn, intending to arrest the lot of them, and
Burnette quickly realizes they’re in trouble because he doesn’t recognize a single
one of these men. Recruits, newbies—therefore trigger-happy, terrified, and dangerous.
He pinpoints their leader and takes the initiative, calling him out,
Corporal, attention, I need to speak with your commander, Captain Joncil, immediately.
The corporal recovers enough to say he wants to see IDs, he wants some explanation
for this wild cowboy shit and Burnette tells him to send a man to find Captain Joncil
and bring him here.

What’s your name? he asks, and the kid, a brave and competent kid, says Corporal Antoine.
Do we have an agreement, Corporal Antoine? and the kid mulls it over and they do.
Burnette’s awareness of the rest of the scene enlarges enough to hear a woman crying
and he finally turns and peers over to the black SUV and sees the Mexican slumped
in the driver’s seat with his pants open and wanger exposed and a skeletal mulatto
woman, much distressed, in the passenger seat. Burnette looks to Scarecrow, Did you
whack this guy? and Scarecrow says, Nope, after your big man there walked away, I
approached the vehicle and this dude here was getting a blowjob from the female and
I knocked on the window and when it went down I darted the guy just as the cops pulled
up. We have about five more minutes to get some cuffs on the dude before he wakes
up.

They ignore the three policemen and order the woman out of the vehicle and go about
their business of securing the Mexican and Honore Vincent and transferring them to
the backseat of the UN SUV and then the truck returns from town with Captain Joncil
and it’s long-lost brothers when he sees his American army friend and Burnette walks
him down the road away from everybody and tells him what he needs to know and slips
him ten very beautiful one-hundred-dollar bills. One mind, one heart, one currency.

Back at the vehicle, Honore Vincent is kicking and thrashing in the backseat and the
Mexican is coming around and Scarecrow and Burnette cuff their feet as well and tape
their mouths and Burnette asks Scarecrow if he wants one of these uniformed Saint-Marc
cops to ride with him and Reginald back up to Le Cap and Scarecrow says, Nope, I got
it, bro, and he bangs both perps with morphine from Burnette’s med kit and takes off
before the police have second thoughts about further matters of legality and profit.

Everybody’s on buddy terms now and the cops join Burnette back at the fete, their
mouths watering from the pervasive aroma of grilled beef, and Burnette checks in with
Renee, who is enjoying her elevated status as a kung-fu goddess. You’re okay then?
he asks her and she says, Sure. perfectly fine, although she thinks she might have
given herself a mild sprain, kicking that ugly son of a bitch, and they stick around
for another hour as the sun sets and the dancing begins and she says, Okay, I’ve had
enough, and he gets a lift down to Port-au-Prince with Renee and Gerard, who drop
him at the Hotel Montana, and she tells him, Sorry for the trouble. Thanks. See you
later. And of course he does, the following night, on the road south of Moulin Sur
Mer.

The second night, shortly before dawn, he’s been in his room at the Montana for thirty
minutes. He’s washing up and the phone rings. It’s the defense attaché from the embassy,
he’s down in the lobby and he wants Burnette to come down with his gear and the attaché
is driving a van hauling the dead girl and they head to the airport, the attaché tells
Burnette the embassy wants him to accompany the body back to the States, and when
they arrive at the airport the DCM is there with an honor guard and he pulls Burnette
aside and tells him a C-130 has been diverted from its regular supply run to Gitmo
to pick up the girl and he wants Burnette to get on that plane and not come back.
Burnette says, Sir, I’m just following orders, and the DCM wants to know whose orders
and Burnette says, Sir, I work for JSOC, and I’ve told you everything I can.

We’ll see about that, Sergeant, fumes the DCM, and the bird comes in, they load up
the casket and fly to MacDill and Burnette catches the first flight available down
to Miami and back to Haiti into foreign policy hell, a madness co-produced by a squabbling,
elbowing rowboat full of US government agencies, battling over a single oar. DOD seems
to be playing it straight, happily mired in its doctrine, blithely committed to the
ideal, standing up an indigenous quasimilitary police force to defend and protect
(or one day overthrow) the freely elected government of Haiti. The DCM, suited up
for the team at State, has a low opinion of the elected government, finds himself
persuaded by the arguments, if not the morals, of the elite families, and is intrigued
by this warlord up in Cap-Haïtien, a former comrade of the guerilla hero Jacques Lecoeur,
a messianic braggart who claims he has been chosen to bring true democracy to his
nation. The CIA has been funding this guy, Ti Phillipe, the commander of the Cap-Haïtien
police force, but they’ve been funding him on the sole principle that the Agency funds
everybody, and they know this guy has serious, perhaps insurmountable public relations
problems, plus there’s an issue with his mental health. The DEA is in play too, lobbying
its interagency counterparts to preserve the status quo.

Whoopee, Burnette says to himself with the blackest cynicism when he’s back that night
on the island, driving north with Gerard toward a possible coup supported by half
the embassy, with the other half supporting a countercoup, which Burnette himself
and his D-boys have been sent in to assist. By the time they reach Plaisance, thirty
miles south of Le Cap, Burnette observes solid evidence of how Colonel Dupuys has
spent the past three days negotiating with Ti Phillipe, the talks no more than a stalling
technique while Dupuys musters loyal forces from throughout the island, the roadside
through Plaisance lined with cattle trucks and pickups and SUVs ferrying north a hundred
members of the national police and palace guard. End of story, really. Burnette hooks
back up with Tilly and Spank, who have almost succumbed to boredom, and the next day
and the following day the D-boys are in discreet attendance of the rout, Dupuys and
his men driving Phillipe and his men out of the city west to Fort-Liberté and then,
after the gesture of a last stand, over the DR border into exile.

Dupuys reconstituted the Cap-Haïtien force, installing loyalists from the capital
and the central plateau, outsiders destined to indulge in their own salad days of
abuse and corruption. Burnette got on the satphone and called in a ride home for Tilly
and Spank and then cajoled Gerard to take him up into the mountains to track down
Margarete and her brother, found them well and safe and Reginald determined to rebuild
their lives on their own land, in their own place, and Burnette vowed to help.

On his last day in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, Burnette paid a visit to the American
consulate, checking on a visa application for Gerard and then, his request spurned,
paid a visit to the American embassy, where he was made to wait at the receptionist’s
desk until he found himself suddenly flanked by a pair of marines and a flak from
State, his escort to the airport.

Au revoir, Haiti.

Book Five

Prelude: Enough Is How Much?

Oh, but the end of safety comes to us all. Right to where we live. My dear, someone
once said, security is superstition. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
And only faith defends.

—Jacki Lyden, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

This is how the dead come back to us, he thinks, rotting angels, bagged and tagged
and shipped home to America in the deceptively clean and shiny crates of their uselessness.
Dispensed, expired, return to sender. The sight, its mimicry, feels vaguely sacrilegious.
He has never seen a flag-draped coffin loaded onto a C-130 before and the fact of
it this time is wrong but how to say something about that to the marines from the
embassy and now he’s not sure what to do with the flag, the thick stiff starchy cloth
like a pup tent or bistro awning folded sloppily in his hands and in his distraction
he drops the flag to the floor of the aircraft, unaware of it underfoot.

They are in the dark deafening tunnel of the fuselage, securing the metal casket to
the bolts sunk in the deck and Burnette wants this crazy thing, this demented harebrained
scheme, over with right now, there’s a Navy doctor in perturbed attendance who came
in on the plane diverted from Gitmo, nervously agreeing, and as soon as the cargo
officer gets off the intercom to the cockpit he raises the ramp on the C-130 and they’re
rolling thunder across the tarmac and Burnette and the doc open the casket.

Mother of God, says the medical officer. What the fuck is this?

For the past twelve hours she has not spent more than sixty minutes out of Burnette’s
sight but the blood still sickens him, dried in her hair and on her face and chest,
necessary for the subterfuge on Route Nationale One and the Saint-Marc police station
and at the Haitian coroner’s, and she looks genuinely dead and miraculously beatific,
an early Christian saint pierced by pagan arrows or skewered by a legionnaire’s lance,
her hands folded above her womb and the rosary she asked for recovered from her purse
in the car and interlaced between her fingers like a binding web of pearls. Start
talking, Sergeant, says Doc, pulling a stethoscope out of his black bag. I get a call
from my command in Gitmo at 0430 telling me to get my ass on this bird and go to Haiti
to monitor and assist in a NASA field test.

NASA? Now it’s Burnette’s turn to be shocked. N-A-S-A?

Correct, says the doc, poking a digital thermometer into her ear canal. Now what in
God’s name is going on, man?

Look, sir, says Burnette. I need to know your security clearance.

I’m good on that, says Doc, trying to draw a blood sample from the crook of her arm.
I was told I’d be monitoring a TS project in suspended animation. Give me a break,
I told the guy. NASA’s doing long-term space travel experiments in Haiti? I don’t
fucking believe it. Now I really don’t believe it, unless the idea is to send dead
people to Mars.

Is she dead?

Pretty close. Who shot her?

It was staged. That’s all I can say.

Burnette tells Bòkò St. Jean to step up and revive her and Doc says, Wait, wait, wait,
who’s this guy? He a doctor?

Yeah, sort of, says Burnette. A bush doctor.

Mother of God.

Doc watches speechless, standing by with his stethoscope and a syringe full of atropine
and another with epinephrine to plunge into her heart in the event of the
houngan
’s failure, but St. Jean prays and separates her blood-caked jaw and he takes a chicken
feather and dips it into an old aspirin bottle and sprinkles the antidote into her
mouth and steps back, praying still, a soundtrack of reverent mumbo jumbo to accompany
the secular grand magic of chemistry. After a while her lips bunch sourly and her
eyelids twitch though they remain closed and Burnette leans over her, waiting and
holding his breath, terrified by her etiolated appearance, watching for her lungs
to refill.

Hold me up, she says from inside the coffin, the weakness in her voice causing him
a twinge of despair. Eville? And her eyes are still sealed but her forearms lift and
she gropes to be taken up, she gropes like a sightless infant for the support of his
arms, fingers clenching and unclenching, the gold crucifix dangling between them in
front of the faith of his own believing eyes. They are taxiing and turning into the
wind and the engines scream and then they are in the rumbling air. He works his hands
under her shoulder blades and his face is in the coffin his cheek to hers, his body
radiating heat like a lamp, and he says, Ready, here we go, and lifts her to a sitting
position and her chin cradles loosely on his collarbone. She feels like a corpse too,
not rigid but inhumanly cold. Pulse is not great, says the leery Doc, who has seized
one of her wrists.

Burnette?

I’m here.

I don’t want to open my eyes, she says in a sick little girl’s voice.

Why not?

I like where I am.

Where are you?

I don’t know.

Let’s get you out of this fucking box, he says. It’s giving me the creeps.

He stands her upright, her arms still monkeyed around his neck and she says, I’m freezing,
where are my shoes? and immediately her teeth chatter and her frame quakes and now
he remembers the flag and knows what to do with it and she opens her eyes, which are
vacant but then gradually her irises seem to collect the sun flaring through a port
window, golden splinters of consciousness, an upwelling lambency of returning life,
the opposite of what he had upon occasion observed in the eyes of the dying, dog or
person or horse or elk all the same when the interior light flicked off in their eyes.
Gone in an instant and you knew it.

Can you stand on your own? he asks.

Keep me warm, she stammers, and he makes her sit in one of the canvas seats along
the fuselage and wraps her in the flag and she becomes giddy, makes a sound like an
unhinged giggle that worries him, and he borrows a flight jacket from one of the crew
and drapes it over her shoulders and sits down next to her and hugs her close and
she says, That is so much better, Ev. The doc presses in with his stethoscope and
examines her pupils with a penlight and says, If this wasn’t classified, boy, this
would be one for the books, and Bòkò St. Jean nods sagely from his seat farther down
along the wall and says,
Pa pwobwem, pa pwobwem, Ayibobo, amen.

I can’t believe you wrapped me in the flag, Dottie tries to joke, the words chopped
through her busy teeth. I’ll never hear the end of it, she says, feigning some category
of sartorial irritation, and Burnette is so relieved he momentarily chokes up before
he pulls himself back together enough to croak, You look like hell.

Thirsty, she says, and the doc comes back with a bottle of water and Burnette asks
him to find a rag or hand towel or something and what she doesn’t drink he uses to
begin a delicate cleansing of her face and throat, finally dabbing around the circumference
of the real wound he fastidiously plugged into the side of her head with the empty
sterilized brass casing of a .357 round, a tiny cookie cutter to stamp a precise hole,
his frantic night-vision surgery the night before on the roadside near Tintayen, removing
the perfectly round bullet-sized flap of skin with a scalpel from his medic’s kit,
trying for a credible volume of her own blood without nicking a vein, St. Jean splashing
a bottle of pig’s blood on her clothes and car seat to add to the illusion of gore,
the police captain and the
bokor
’s nephew keeping Parmentier at bay across the road in the quarry.

Ow, she says, jerking away from him. That fucking hurts.

Your feeling’s coming back.

And you thought I had none. Fuck, Ev! I said that hurts.

As much as being dead?

Being dead, she says and her voice trails.

Every few seconds like a slowly blinking light she moans and he asks Doc to bring
another bottle of water and his SF med kit which he opens and then twists the cap
from a prescription and gives her a tablet and takes one for himself and she swallows
it before asking what is it and he tells her oxcycontin, which is how he treats his
back injury, and Doc, overhearing, says Go easy with that stuff and Burnette says,
Roger that.

They doze off together in the opiated warmth of their awkward cuddle and wake up on
the touch down at MacDill and she squeezes his hand with a force that tells him her
strength has returned and she says softly, Thank you, and tells him, Your gift to
me is my death, and he doesn’t like the tenor of that and doesn’t know what she means
and maybe she senses his puzzlement and disapproval because her attitude springs headlong
forward to the self he knows best.

I am your zombie bitch forever, she says, and he says that’s the last zombie joke
he ever wants to hear. She looks at the aluminum casket, shuddering, and says I have
to climb back in there, don’t I? and it’s different now and she doesn’t want to and
asks for another one of his pills and then he lifts her back into the box and tucks
the day pack with her personal effects next to her side. He’s already feeling queasy
himself when she says she might throw up and it’s a grim moment when he lowers the
lid, her eyes watching his as it brings its darkness over her, and then the ramp is
down and he can see the hearse out there and the reception of another honor guard
and they take her away as a Jane Doe to the morgue, the Navy doc riding with her,
and they clear the area of all personnel and here she is again, popping out of the
death cake and onto a gurney to be whisked to an isolation ward at the base hospital
for two days of observation and interviews, access restricted to a small cadre of
wide-eyed doctors, military neurologists and psychiatrists joined by her professor
from Harvard and an agency scientist, a biochem specialist from a disbanded DOD team
formerly tasked with conducting psychotropic experiments on enlisted men at Fort Dexter,
Maryland, during the 1980s, and, yes, some space agency geek from Hunstville, the
calculated decision to use the
houngan
’s powders a natural outcome of a highly classified research mission that from the
beginning carried a NASA imprimatur. Her final visitor, at dinnertime on her last
night there before discharge, is her father.

Whatever she and Burnette were working out with each other in the past they worked
out this time in Haiti and so in her day pack is an envelope with the address of his
town house and a key because she can’t be seen in Florida, especially Florida but
anywhere, and she needs to stay dead until she can be reassembled and baptized anew
into the midnight flock and he wonders if she’ll turn up in Fayetteville or disappear
from his life altogether back into the Agency’s nethery vortex. He stands at the top
of the ramp inside the bowel-like cavern of the fuselage as the soldiers slide her
into the idling hearse and Burnette turns and recedes into the dimness of the plane
to get his gear, stopping to stare mindlessly into the empty place that had contained
her coffin. After a moment Bòkò St. Jean is there next to him, looking, also, into
the dreamless afterglow of it all, and Ev swings an appreciative arm over the fellow’s
shoulders and helps him down the ramp to deliver him to his escorts, his American
rainmakers, some suit from State and someone, maybe INS or maybe US marshalls, and
the master
houngan
is driven away in a town car, about to rise from the dead himself, a soul in search
of asylum, reincarnated as a bureaucratic conundrum.

Then Burnette finds a ride over to the commercial airport to catch a plane to Miami,
where he connects with the late afternoon flight to Port-au-Prince and tracks down
the immensely distraught and grieving Gerard and tells him, It looks like a nice night
for a ride up north, my friend.

The woman is dead, the woman is dead, Gerard laments, wagging his head in disbelief,
and there’s nothing Eville can tell the driver to assuage his sorrow.

I heard, man, says Burnette, switching from Kreyol to somber, almost angry English,
feeling like a coldhearted prick but not ashamed about it either, not truly, because
the truth could only console Gerard up to the point where his own life was cheapened
by it, radically devalued; worth, in fact, nothing at all. I heard, he says again.
Her husband whacked her.

But she is protected by you! How can this happen?

You know her better than me, Gerard. She told me to go away.

She sent me away as well.

Go figure, says Burnette.

I do not cry, Gerard insists, but then, astonished by himself, he does, a little.