The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (9 page)

You have come to see me? he asked in Kreyol.

Oui
.

You are welcome here. Please tell me what you want.

Jesus Christ! Tom yelped.

Without a sound the sick woman had come hurling out of her chair and pitched facedown
in the dirt at their feet, vomiting a cloudy ocher liquid that splashed across the
toes of his boots and the cuffs of his pants but missed Jackie, who jerked her legs
up just in time. His instinct to somehow help was immediate but just as quickly blunted
by the confusing response of everyone else, the
houngan
calm and unconcerned, not looking down at the woman but still at Tom, chin up and
expectant, waiting to hear his response. One by one the other Haitians snapped out
of their gloom to collect themselves and glide, noiseless and wraithlike, through
the curtain, their communal obligation to the prostrate woman apparently terminated.
Just as puzzling was Jackie, who scooted off Tom’s lap onto an empty chair, crossed
her legs impatiently, and leaned forward, oblivious to the woman on the ground, her
crisis a slight annoyance at best, looking back and forth between Tom and the
houngan,
anxious for them to get on with it.

Tom’s eyes were fastened on the woman’s back, her shoulder blades like embryonic wings
ready to burst through her black skin. He was going to reach down and check her pulse
when the
houngan
repeated his question and Tom asked, without thinking,
What is a soul?
and the priest answered this and every question without hesitation.

That in you which belongs to God.

Can you lose your soul?

No,
monsieur
. It can be stolen by the devil.

It can only be stolen?

Oui, monsieur
.

You can’t misplace it?

Oui, monsieur,
you can misplace it.

How?

What followed was an elaborate but often cryptic explanation about big and little
angels—
gros bon ang
and
ti bon ang
—celestial checks and balances, the cosmic vulnerability of humans when they fall
asleep, and an unintelligible caveat about bad deeds—literally, the mistakes of man—in
a jumble of Kreyol. He was relieved to find Gerard still there, posted like a sentry
in the doorway, but his translation was even less coherent than Tom’s own grasp of
what was spilling out of the
houngan
.

What are you guys talking about? said Jackie. She seemed peevish and edgy.

Hold on, Tom said to her, turning back to the priest to make clear the nature of the
problem. This woman says she lost her soul. She wants to know if you can help her
get it back.

The
houngan
looked away from the white man and considered Jackie for the first time with more
than courtesy, examining her from head to toe while she stared back at him impassively.
He kept his searching eyes on her even as he asked Tom how she had misplaced her soul,
and Tom, eager for the answer himself, relayed the question to Jackie but she shook
her head with an almost imperceptible flash of defiance and said it wasn’t important.
Looking at her, trying his best to comprehend her, Tom realized that should he ever
mention it, she would never acknowledge what had just happened between them, the secret
conversation of their flesh; she would cluck her tongue and say he had quite a horny
little imagination, didn’t he?

Can he help me or not? she insisted, her eyes locked with the
houngan
’s, who did not wait for the English to be translated but answered,
Oui,
and Tom found himself brokering an unreal negotiation. For ten dollars, the
houngan
said, he would pray to the gods for her protection.

What will that do? Jackie asked, and the
houngan
admitted, Not much. To do more, he said, would require an offering to the
lwas
to merit their full attention. Tom asked for further specifics before he translated
and the
houngan
allowed that he could perform a small offering for fifty dollars and a bigger offering
for much more. How much more? Tom asked him. A goat for a hundred dollars, a bull
for five hundred dollars. If he sacrificed a bull for the woman, the priest said,
the
lwas
would be very happy and certainly he could persuade one of them to go locate the
woman’s soul and return it to her. When Tom turned half-around and began to explain
this to Jackie, he was taken aback by the smirk on her face and her unlikely self-assurance.

Look, he’s not being unreasonable, Tom said, exasperated. The animals cost money.
This is how he makes his living. This is the only way he knows how to help you. And,
after a sullen pause, This is what you wanted.

Jackie guffawed. Fifty dollars to kill a chicken! That’s bullshit.

He had, at Jackie’s bidding and despite his common sense, taken her seriously up to
this point and for a moment he thought the issue making her balk might not be the
bargaining price as much as her own poverty and he foolishly offered to lend her the
money.

I’m not giving this man fifty dollars. Don’t be ridiculous.

Suit yourself, he said indifferently although he struggled to contain his anger and
ignore her arch tone, the juvenile play of contempt across her lips. Suddenly she
seemed to him traitorous and venal and crass and he felt duped by this woman, her
frivolous seduction of his inclination to be sincere and useful. But there was a ceiling
to his ability to care, wasn’t there? A ceiling to anyone’s ability to care, unless
you were deranged. It’s your soul, he told her. I would think that it’s worth at least
fifty dollars.

I have news for you, she said. It’s not.

All right, then it’s time to end this game.

It’s not a game.

Tell me what you want to call it then, he said to her back as she jumped to her feet
and ducked past Gerard through the curtain. And honestly, what was he supposed to
think about her grinding her lovely ass into his cock like that? How excruciatingly
intolerable to think she might one day tell this story at a dinner party back in the
States and set the table howling with laughter.
Don’t laugh,
she had pleaded with Tom in the car, and he had no doubt now that to laugh would
be impossible. He felt at a loss to even imagine what her motive might have been for
soliciting his help to come here. Her bratty fickleness, skating from one impulse
to another, preempted any thought of motives—motives seemed simply beyond her. But
what’s a soul worth after all? Not a goddamn cent, not one gourde, and if you’re in
hell kicking around with a hapless lot of humanitarians and do-gooders, even less.

The sheer farce of it all.

He felt a rash of guilt heat his face as he glanced at the woman on the ground, shocked
by his inability to see her as anything but an inanimate object, and then he refocused
on the
houngan
to be done with the protocol of their visit, offering an awkward explanation of his
friend’s wish to think things over before she made a decision. Perhaps he would return
with her another day, he lied, and the
houngan
said
Bon,
but send word so the animal could be purchased and made ready. Tom extended his hand
and the
houngan
shook it with limp goodwill.

What is your name, monsieur?

Bòkò St. Jean.

Harrington came to his feet in a slow rise, absently patting his pocket to give the
priest a few dollars for his time but as he stood he felt himself pushing up through
a heavy cloud of dread and he understood what he knew he should have realized earlier,
that, distracted by Jackie posting in his lap, something was terribly wrong, that
the exorcism had not been a success, that the woman half-stripped of her dress hadn’t
simply lost consciousness from the strain of the ritual. Wearily, he bent his knees
and lowered himself next to her body, wrapping his fingers under the wrist of her
flattened hand, a hand unadorned by the priceless rings of friendship or love, unable
to find a pulse. Her face was smashed straight down in the dirt, her mouth opened
as if she were eating it, and beyond her head the bowl he did not want to look into
but did, the calabash shell filled with liquid as black and viscous as crankcase oil,
floating with blackened sprigs of herbs and ghostly tissues of flesh and grayish globs
of unidentifiable organs, unspeakably detestable and lurid as death itself.

He stood up and was going to say something useless about an ambulance or a doctor
but the
houngan
waved a hand to tell him not to worry.

She is ours, said Bòkò St. Jean. We will attend to her, and Tom gave him money so
that the woman might have the otherwise unattainable dignity of a pinewood coffin.

He walked blinking back into the sunlight, past Gerard and Jackie who followed him
around to the front of the compound, across the shadeless scorch of the courtyard,
down the steep bank to the road and the roasting car. He opened all the doors to let
the heat out and handed the keys to Gerard and after a minute they climbed in and
Gerard made a U-turn and they drove south.

I could use something cold to drink, said Jackie.

Tom sighed heavily in the backseat and announced that the woman in the daffodil dress
had died. Jackie looked over her shoulder at him, inscrutable, without any visible
emotion or conciliatory gesture, not the faintest suggestion of either regret or compassion,
as if she had lived a life already overpopulated by dying women under her feet.

What did she have? AIDS?

I don’t know.

He became fixated, though, on the intense color of her irises, robin’s egg blue, and
she returned his gaze, holding it until it seemed to Tom they both knew and understood
each other much too well and had formed a shameless bond that he couldn’t conceive
as being anything other than dark and fiery and heartless. She turned away to look
ahead out the windshield and he bowed his head in thoughtless reverie, noticing for
the first time the dried oval patch on his olive-drab pants, the left leg, mid-thigh,
where she had melted into him, the stain mocking the pretense of his altruism. He
ran his fingernail along it, exploring the slightly starched texture of the patch,
and rode to Saint-Marc in a glassy state of distress, confounded by the outrage and
exhilaration of her audacity.
She’s dangerous,
he thought, which was not a particularly differentiating trait in Haiti, nor an isolating
condition, and he knew it was not unthinkable or wholly impossible that he might find
himself, in more appropriate surroundings, enjoying this woman’s brand of trouble
.

Gerard slowed down as they entered the ruined streets of Saint-Marc and Jackie, sweet-voiced,
reminded him that she was dying of thirst.

CHAPTER SEVEN

He speaks English, Tom Harrington said. You won’t need me.

Harrington would not go into the morgue with Dolan but waited outside near the rental
car, ignoring a promise to his wife by smoking a cigarette. Of all the vile horrors
to which he had willingly exposed himself, the morgue in downtown Port-au-Prince was
in some respects the most ghastly, the one that produced in him the most unbalanced
existential sense of spiraling vertigo, and he had no wish to have his shoes defiled
by the fulsome ooze channeling its concrete floor, or stare in cold despair at the
boxcar-sized room where the bloated corpses of infants and children were stacked like
cordwood, waiting for the loan of a dump truck from Public Works to be hauled to the
swamps of Tintayen.

He knew the coroner, Monsieur Laurent, well, knew he was at heart a good man, educated
and courtly and gentle, but Laurent had been over-supplied by his country’s harvest
of death, with no resources to manage his vocation with competence or delicacy, the
excess rotting out of sight until its eventual disposal. Cause of death? Why ask,
why bother? To understand what? To satisfy whom? Does God ask such questions of the
dead? What most disturbed Tom was the violation of the principle, his conviction that
death presented an obligation to the living to restore value to lives without overt
value, to declare at last to the society that which the society never seemed able
to acknowledge—here is a human being, let us show respect. Dignity first and then,
perhaps, justice, but here at the morgue both were rebuffed by crude practicalities.

He watched a swarm of skinny, bare-chested boys weaving through traffic kicking a
scuffed soccer ball, a gift from the American soldiers who had tossed out hundreds
from their passing convoys in the final months of the occupation. By the time his
interest had turned to a pair of toiling stevedores up from the wharves, enslaved
to a wooden pushcart stacked overhead with bags of cement, Conrad Dolan was emerging
from the stinking depths of the morgue, his face red and splotchy and his eyes hardened,
wiping his mouth with a bandanna pulled from the hip pocket of his jeans. He walked
past Tom to the SUV and got in and waited for Tom to start it up and crawl back into
traffic, headed for the American Embassy, farther downtown toward the port.

A few blocks on, Dolan, straightening the slump of his back and shoulders, released
a long groaning sigh and blew his nose into the bandanna with enough force to clear
his senses. Son of a bitch, Dolan rasped. If anything happens to me down here, burn
my body in the friggin’ streets before you let anybody put me in there.

Tom asked if Monsieur Laurent had been able to tell him anything new about Jackie’s
death and Dolan said,
Yeah, yeah,
as if whatever he had learned inside the morgue amounted to a vast annoyance. This
guy, this coroner, never properly examined the body, said Dolan. Laurent’s name was
on the death certificate under the inexact description of the cause—
gunshot to right side of head
—with no reference to forensic particulars, powder burns or caliber or exit wound
or time of death. When asked to explain himself, Dr. Laurent had told Dolan that he
had done no more and no less than what had been required of him by the laws of Haiti
and by the Americans. When the coroner had arrived at the morgue that morning several
weeks ago, a dark blue embassy van was parked by the door; apparently it had retrieved
the body of the woman during the night and brought her down from the police station
in Saint-Marc’s.

As the doctor had approached the van, its front doors opened and two white men dressed
in coats and ties stepped out to meet Laurent, waving embassy identification badges
and handing him four copies of the Republic of Haiti’s Certificate of Death, each
form completed except for his signature. The men had apologized for being in a hurry—a
military flight was waiting at the airport to receive the body and deliver the remains
of Renee Gardner back to the States. If you don’t mind just signing each copy, one
of the men said, and Laurent had replied,
Mais, oui,
Of course, but if the gentlemen didn’t mind, he preferred not to sign without first
viewing the deceased, it was his duty, and the men seemed to expect this request and
slid open the side door to the van and there inside was a squared aluminum casket.
One of the men unbuckled the clasps to its lid; the other man held the woman’s passport
in Laurent’s face, open to her picture. The first man raised the lid of the coffin
to a forty-five-degree angle and the coroner stepped forward.
Bon,
he said after a minute, and signed the papers.

Dolan had asked the coroner if he had noticed anything unusual about the body, something
he might remember of its condition. Laurent had said no. Anything make an impression
on you, Dolan asked. No
. . .
, said Laurent elliptically, and then, after thinking about it, said, Yes. Poor child,
no one had troubled to wash the blood from her, she was a terrible mess. And I remember
I was filled with shame, Laurent continued, because she was a
blan
and her feet were bare, someone must have stolen her shoes. Unfortunately, this is
not so unusual. We take from the fallen, like soldiers on a battlefield.

The traffic unclogged and slowly began to move again and he put the car in gear and
drove toward the embassy, Tom’s thoughts looping back toward a single bit of information
he was unsure how to interpret. Jackie’s body had been returned to the States on a
military flight and he wondered why, and if such an arrangement was common. Apparently
Dolan was thinking the same thing.

That kid got special treatment, said Dolan.

The military flight. The dispatch of a van. As a special agent working out of the
Bureau’s office in San Juan, Connie Dolan had become familiar with standard procedure
for dealing with American citizens murdered throughout the Caribbean. A consulate
would notify the victim’s family, help them make the necessary arrangements with a
local funeral home, shepherd the paperwork through the bureaucracies, provide flight
schedules for whatever U.S. carriers serviced the island, and, if no family member
showed up to accompany the body home, be there at the airport to oversee the transfer
of the coffin from hearse to cargo hold and sign off on the documentation. The process
took days or weeks, depending on whether the crime was a political asset, a liability,
or a wash for an existing regime and its opposition—and every government saw opportunity
in even the accidental death of an American on its soil, ransoming the body back to
the bereaved family for many thousands of dollars.

What would you like to bet, said Dolan, that your lady friend was pulling a paycheck
from the U.S. government?

Harrington had half-expected to hear this about Jackie because no other explanation
of her behavior made much sense. She was working for the Feds then? That’s what you’re
saying? he said neutrally. Dolan clicked his tongue in exasperation and Tom, with
a sidelong glance, felt the reproach of his flinty look.

Feds who? said Dolan, caustic, bristly. I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. Sometimes
you can be in it and not be in it at the same time, if you get my drift, or you can
be in a part of it that’s at war with another part and go missing in action. The goddamn
thing only looks monolithic from the outside. Inside, it’s all tribes in the jungle,
my friend.

At the fortresslike entrance to the embassy, they slid their passports through the
slot in the bulletproof glass to the marine on duty and endured the menace of his
scrutiny. Dolan repeated the name of the deputy chief of mission, the hour of their
appointment, then watched as the guard phoned upstairs and wrote their names in the
log and finally buzzed them through the doors into the relief of the air-conditioned
building. They were greeted by the garish red smile of a birdlike woman in heels,
blouse, and a pencil skirt whose silent mistrust was reciprocal and reminded Tom of
why he disliked coming here, crossing the street of a sovereign nation to enter a
parallel universe of power to which you always came a beggar, bowing to its vanity.
Without bothering to identify herself, she invited Dolan to have a seat in the reception
area and, before Dolan could protest, whisked Tom down the hall and up a set of stairs
to the DCM’s office, past a formidable-looking secretary, knocked on the door of the
inner sanctum as she swung it open and chirped as she retreated, There you are.

The deputy chief of mission, tall without appearing athletic, his narrow face beaming
with the pride of reason, rose from behind his desk to shake Tom Harrington’s hand
and congratulate the human rights advocate on his work, Harrington’s tenacious efforts
to achieve what the DCM’s predecessor had done everything in his power to prevent
him from achieving. Tom nodded cautiously, recalling the erstwhile DCM’s shrewd joviality
and aversion to eye contact. The predecessor, an African-American with the unfortunate
name of Lynch, a former basketball star and student activist at a midwestern state
university, had, during the early days of the occupation promised Harrington, in the
name of the ambassador and the president, all aid and assistance at his disposal in
support of the establishment of a Commission of Truth and Justice for the newly democratic
republic. And instead, in the passing months, the embassy seemed more inclined to
act as pimps for the ancien régime, good at providing the ringleaders with golden
parachutes, silk lifejackets, Washington’s attitude—let’s just forget it and move
on—surely not conducive to righting wrongs but to burying them. His final meeting
with Lynch had taken place two days after his disastrous trip up north with Jackie
Scott and was attended by the embassy’s general counsel, Haiti’s interim Minister
of Justice, a senile and imperious member of the high court retired by the tyrants,
and a staff member from the National Security Council.

Harrington had listened to the counsel’s bland tone informing him of the embassy’s
position on the Commission and why it was never likely to be seated: not in the interest
of the common good, no absolute necessity, the road to the future must not detour
into the past, and so on. After a sentence of flowery boilerplate praise for Tom’s
service to the republic, the minister consented to this betrayal and doddered from
the room. Lynch, who had seemed indifferent to the proceeding, his pensive gaze directed
out the office window toward the glare of the late morning, had turned toward Tom
with an insipid half-smile and said this democracy thing was still playing out down
here and let’s not be so hasty as to give anyone an advantage. The general counsel
nodded glumly and declared we don’t like the old guys, but we don’t much like the
new guys, either. Who do you like? Tom had asked. We’re constantly working that, said
Lynch. Still in diapers, said the general counsel. The unborn are looking pretty good
too. The staff member from the NSC, a black, not from Arkansas like Lynch but from
Massachusetts, educated at Haverford and Georgetown, tipped forward in his chair and
confided in Harrington,
You can’t get around the fact that they’re crazy niggers
. Everyone stunned into silence. The general counsel frowned. Lynch chuckled through
a grimace and threw out his hands as if to say, There you have it.
Face it,
Tom had said, bellicose, standing up,
you’re a fucking disgrace
.

We appreciate all you’ve done, said Lynch, rising to his feet as well to walk Tom
to the door. It’s had a great impact on our ability to scout the players, keep score,
leverage out some of the bad guys who should never be given the ball.

Lynch had opened the door for him and followed Tom out of the office, lowering his
voice to say he had heard about Tom’s adventure up north and was pleased to learn
that Tom—good old Tom, the Great American Tom Harrington—knew how to take care of
himself. Lynch had extended his hand, smiling, exaggerating the whispered enunciation
of his words, as if he were a singing messenger.

Unless you really dig it down here in the pit, bro, pack your bags and go home.

Sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, flanked by the Stars and Stripes, the new deputy
chief of mission sat at his desk beneath a row of framed photographs—autographed
portraits of the president of the United States and the secretary of state, an unsigned
portrait of the president of Haiti, pictures of the DCM shaking hands with Nelson
Mandela, eyeball to eyeball with Fidel Castro, sharing a joke with Slobodan Milosevic,
a much younger, mustachioed DCM among a trio of envoys meeting the Shah of Iran. Tom
saw in him the perfected embodiment of the diplomatic caste: an attentive, inquisitive
smile, intellectually fit, at least for the fluid conversation of receptions and dinner
parties, among people cozy within their own ranks but otherwise aloof, supernaturally
calm and thus naturally and perhaps even unconsciously brave, displeased by confrontation,
self-assured in the blithe arrogance of their optimism, prepared to push their mothers
off a cliff for the sake of almighty policy.

I love Miami, said the DCM, and they pretended to relax into a chatty dialogue about
favorite restaurants in South Beach and Coral Gables. But as Tom began to feel courted
by the official, his own half of the conversation became more guarded and at the first
lull he broke the pretense of their ease.

Why am I here?

Sorry? said the DCM, ostentatious in his puzzlement. You made an appointment.

A private investigator by the name of Conrad Dolan made the appointment and you have
him on ice down in the lobby.

Ah, Connie Dolan, said the DCM. His eyes brightened and he raised his arms and leaned
back into the cushion of his chair, locking his fingers behind his head.