American Romantic (22 page)

When Basso awakened, Harry said it was time for him to leave for the airport.

Too bad, Basso said. I was going to take you around to see the houses.

What houses? Harry said.

The tycoons' houses. There are tycoons on the island now. Big houses. Biggest damned houses you've ever seen. Swimming pools. Can you imagine swimming pools on an island? I know some of them but they're hard to talk to. I don't care what they know, and they don't care what I know.

The tycoons lose, Harry said.

Basso brightened. I think they do, he said.

I'm glad I came to see you, Harry said.

I'm glad, too.

I wish you'd take back the compass.

No can do, Basso said.

Well, OK. One last thing.

What's that?

Did you ever see the report of the board of inquiry?

Never did, Basso said.

Do you want to?

Basso shook his head. Nah.

Sure?

Damn sure, Basso said. They shook hands and Harry walked away to his rental car. There wasn't much to tell, really. The board of inquiry—three former ambassadors and the Department counsel—deliberated for six months, interviewing the relevant parties and examining the paper trail, what there was of it. Harry was cooperative and when the salient question was asked, Whose idea was this?, Harry replied that he understood it to be a joint venture of the secretary of state and Ambassador Basso Earle. But others may have been involved. The White House, for example. But if they were, he had no knowledge of it. I was too far down the food chain, Harry said. For what it was worth, Harry had agreed with the idea, and agreed also that the probability of success was not high.

And there was no loss of life, the Department counsel said, turning the page, literally and figuratively.

Yes, there was loss of life, Harry replied. I killed a man. Shot him dead. So for the moment the page remained unturned as Harry was asked to explain himself, the circumstances, his own frame of mind. He thought, Frame of mind?
Frame of mind?
So he sketched out the frame of mind, the counsel declining to make any sort of eye contact. It was like talking to the statue of a stargazer. Though he was not asked to do so, Harry described the boy and the carbine in detail, including the moment when he flung himself forward, the boy falling and striking his head, the carbine in Harry's fingers, and the shot—unbelievably loud in the stillness of the jungle. Appalling, really. It was evident to him as he went along that he was giving more detail than was wanted, but he decided to tell it all so that there would be no additional questions, a misapprehension as it turned out. The counsel said, Are you skilled with firearms? Harry said, Not particularly. The counsel said, Would you describe your action as self-defense? Yes, Harry said. But there might have been something short of lethal force . . . He let the sentence hang and went on, But I'll never know. No one will. The counsel ordered the technician to turn off the tape recorder.

The counsel said, Were you of sound mind when you encountered the enemy soldier?

Sound enough to have pulled the trigger.

What I mean is—

I was not myself, Harry conceded.

You were injured. You were under stress.

It had not been a happy day, Harry said.

And there were no witnesses, the counsel said.

No witnesses, Harry replied.

Do you have any idea of the dead man's identity? His name? Did he have a rank?

No idea. I do know that I didn't like him. I didn't like his face, a cruel face, pockmarked in places. A low forehead, high cheekbones, pig's eyes. A nasty customer.

Is that why you shot him?

I had no choice, Harry said.

The counsel turned to the technician and told him to restart the tape recorder.

And what happened next? Take it from the moment you arrived at USAID House.

Harry smiled broadly. Don't you want to hear about the snake?

The board of inquiry took another two months to sift its findings. By that time the war was in full flood, five divisions of American troops in-country and another three still to come. Events were in the saddle. The board was said to have produced a document with the highest possible classification. The results were never made public, and there was some question of whether it had been properly filed. The burn bag was the most likely alternative. There were so many untoward incidents in the war—and so many missions that had no clear provenance. No obvious point of departure and no obvious objective. What exactly did you expect to happen? These missions resembled the art market, the Old Master that had been through two dozen galleries in nine countries, so many dealers, so many buyers, and hard to sort them out because dealer and buyer were often the same person or anyway related by blood or by bed. Somewhere along the line the bills of sale had disappeared. The connoisseur had to rely on his own eye and instinct, qualities honed over many years. While no one could prove him right, no one could prove him wrong either. And so the Steen or the Van Dyck slipped from hand to hand and finally from sight altogether.

The one episode he never explained, because no one asked the direct question, was the Chinese venerable and his boy in the throne room of the Datsun truck. Truth was, the episode defied explanation. Even now, decades later, his hours in the Datsun seemed to him a kind of stop-time, the sudden glare of headlights, the exquisite manners of the venerable, his young son—if that was who the boy was—pouring water. No intelligible word passed between them, unless you counted his fractured question, Amel'can? That, Harry kept to himself. The episode seemed to him to embody something of the supernatural. Of this he was certain: The old man had saved his life. In any case, the relevant parties had all passed on. Harry thought of himself as the sole survivor of a far-flung family, the last repository of an intimate history. And those many facts of which he was unaware or suspicious—well, they were dead, too, and buried. He believed he dwelled in a city of the dead, and they were too numerous to be counted accurately. That afternoon in the gazebo, Basso Earle had asked Harry this question: All things considered, looking back on it now, are you happy you chose diplomacy as your life's work? Harry laughed and said, Of course. What other business is there for someone like me? He laughed again and said, A connoisseur of the counterfeit and the inexplicable.

 

Each afternoon, round about three, weather permitting, the ambassador took tea on the verandah of his cottage. He sipped tea and watched the afternoon slip away. Harry looked across flat fields to the defile that led to the narrow estuary, a fingernail of the Mediterranean. Along its quays and clinging to the stone cliffs that loomed above it were houses mostly occupied by fishermen and their families. Here and there adventurous outsiders had built villas for summer and fall holidays. The spring, as a rule, was wet, and the winter windy. The fishing village below was approached by a treacherous switchback road. Only the fishermen and the few summer people were allowed in. Parking space was at a premium. On a bright summer day the view of the harbor was superb, fishing smacks next to small sloops and now and again an enormous yacht anchored at the mouth of the estuary, the skipper always careful to leave ample room for passage. Beyond all this was the sea, brilliant in all seasons. The villagers, both breeds, were intolerant of outsiders. There were no amenities in the village beyond a simple bar-restaurant and a fishmonger, open in the afternoons. The fishmonger also sold gasoline at outrageous prices. There were no showers, public toilets, souvenir shops, or gendarmes. The foreign yachtsmen were tolerated so long as they paid in cash and did not linger. The village was notorious all along the coast east of Marseilles for its inhospitality. It was such a pretty location, so welcoming from a distance, so peaceable in the summer light, that from time to time a professional photographer unaware of its reputation would happen by to take pictures only to find himself surrounded by burly men and told to go back where he came from, and it took only minutes for him to pack up his camera gear and commence the long climb up the near-vertical road.

Harry had never been there. His damaged feet could not take him down and certainly could not take him back up. He watched the comings and goings through powerful binoculars, not that the comings and goings enlightened him. He admired the village's situation, a child's conception of a pirate's cove. Its aspect was medieval, the houses constructed of stone, many of them with wooden porches. The steps leading to them were stone, and at dusk, the sun westering, the houses appeared to be hanging on the cliff without visible means of support. In the early morning, when the small fleet embarked for the fishing grounds, they ghosted through the mouth of the inlet like great whales. In the rain the village was as forlorn as any on earth, the air, the water, and the walls of the cliff an identical shade of gray. With the rain came mist, then fog. When the air cleared, Harry found the boats back in harbor. Harry saw the village as a means of escape. In that way it resembled a crease in a mountain chain, the crease that allowed a climber to descend safely. He knew people who would take him there for a look-around but never bothered to ask them. He liked the idea of its inaccessibility, its oddity and hostility to outsiders. He liked to think of the village as in some sense a version of himself. Harry finished his tea and picked up the binoculars and looked east and west. The sea was empty.

He sighed heavily and stepped off the verandah and onto the path that led to the rear of his house. He moved slowly, using his cane, because the path was narrow and uneven. Under the enormous plane tree was his wife's grave, simple granite with her name, May Huerwood Sanders, and the dates. Whatever the weather, Harry visited her each afternoon, speaking a few words, clearing the night's debris from beneath the plane tree. Beyond the grave was rising terrain with farmhouses and a few vacation villas. The morning silence was disturbed only a little by the movement of the tree's long branches and in the distance the faint hum of an automobile. Harry could hear the sigh of his own breathing. Auspicious, he thought, evidence of life, however slow. He sat on the bench under the tree, resting his chin on the crown of his whalebone cane, a birthday present from May. They were in Oslo then. He was at the end of his tour and awaiting a fresh assignment.

They had taken an afternoon stroll in the neighborhood, and the moment she saw the cane in the window of a men's shop she walked in and bought it, not without difficulty. The owner tried to explain that the cane was not for sale but for decoration, a bibelot. But when pressed he came up with a price, a ludicrous price, but May was not to be denied. For your birthday, she said, though Harry's birthday was weeks off. She immediately threw his old cane into a trash barrel. She said, An ambassador should have a serious cane, an ambassadorial cane, don't you agree? And it will remind us of Oslo wherever we go. White nights. Salmon. Herring. They strolled on, discussing Harry's new assignment. May wanted someplace warm, perhaps a capital near the seashore. The Mediterranean was an agreeable sea. Wouldn't Tunis be a good posting? Horseback riding was her favorite outdoor activity, and she knew for a fact that horses were present in Tunisia. Why don't you suggest Tunis, Harry? He remembered saying that Tunis wasn't a bad idea, knowing that the chances for a posting there were slim to none. He had no special knowledge of the Arab world. He did not speak Arabic. He had read the Koran but concluded that its dreaminess translated well enough into English, always allowing for obscure syntax: “Surely God wrongs not men, but themselves men wrong.” He said, What about Greece? All those islands requiring his personal attention, Hydra, Santorini. Santorini was said to be especially fine for bird watching. Bird watching on horseback, he added. May did not reply right away, preoccupied as she was by Tunisia. They walked on. Harry couldn't remember the remainder of the day. Probably they went to dinner at Charlys, grilled salmon with a savory dill sauce. In those days the American ambassador could walk around unencumbered by drivers and bodyguards, especially in Scandinavia; then came Olof Palme's assassination and the rules were rewritten, though not drastically. Then he remembered they did not go to Charlys but dined in with the mayors of Bismarck and Duluth and their wives, in Norway visiting relatives. They had written asking if they could meet for a meal and May suggested dinner at the residence; she had always had an interest in the Dakotas and Minnesota. That was news to Harry. But the mayors were interesting on economic conditions in the upper Midwest. At that time both cities were losing population. A way of life was disappearing. Norway, meanwhile, was prospering.

That was the extent of his recollection of dinner with the mayors and their wives. He tapped May's headstone with the tip of his whalebone cane and lamented his stuttering memory. There were tests available to assess the severity of memory loss and the causes and the prognosis. But what idiot would take such a test? So what? The news was either good or bad, and if bad, nothing to be done but continue to beaver away at crossword puzzles. A sentence of life, as it were, without parole. Now he watched a grasshopper light on the tip of his cane. Harry was not a connoisseur of insect species but, by God, this one was ungainly, all legs. He wondered if grasshoppers were identical the world over or if there were subtle variations like alligators and crocodiles or Germans and Austrians. This one was self-possessed, immobile on the tip of the whalebone cane. Wait him out, be patient, Harry thought. And then in an instant it was gone. Next time someone asked him about retirement he'd tell them about watching a grasshopper and waiting it out, offering his misshapen wrist as a landing zone and having the offer refused.

He rose, tapping the cane on granite.

It's a beautiful day, he said aloud.

A beautiful day for riding horses.

So long, sweetheart, see you tomorrow.