Bay of Souls (11 page)

The sight of Paul in the snow triggered unreasoning panic. Yet instead of calling him, Michael watched and waited. Paul was crouching behind the bank, chipping away at the side of it, gathering up the icy snow and packing it into snowballs.

When the next pair of high beams lit the road, Paul raised himself for a quick look over the jagged parapet. As the car approached, he pressed himself against the snow wall, cradling a supply of snowballs like an infantryman with a string of grenades. At the crucial moment, he stood up and let go with the chunks, passing them left hand to right, hurling them sidearm at the passing car. After each throw, he shouted something Michael could not make out.

Michael took a few measured steps over the snow toward the boy's position. Another car came up; he hung back. Watching Paul, he could tell even in the darkness that the boy was in distress. After releasing the last snowball of his fusillade, he would crouch and clench his fists and utter the little cry. Then the last car went by untouched and Paul was out of ammunition.

"Paul?"

His son stiffened as though struck. He spun around and took a false step as if to run, first to one side then to the other.

"Hey, buddy. Just be cool."

Paul doubled up, weeping. Michael walked out and put an arm around his shoulder and started walking him inside.

"Don't you think you could cause an accident doing that?" He spoke gently and his easiness was unaffected; he was not angry. "Do you want someone to run off the road?"

Paul pulled away from him.

"Ice can break a window, man," he said. Paul broke for the house and vanished into it.

Michael followed him in, waited a few minutes and then went upstairs to Paul's room. The room was dark and Paul was huddled under the quilt. All of his bedtime rituals had gone unobserved. No time for a read from the books neatly tucked beside the lamp, no notes to himself in his mother's scrupulous hand. His teeth went unbrushed and there were no evening prayers. Michael was not about to push it.

"I hope you know," he said, "that you can talk about anything with me. The troubles you have are very likely to be similar to the ones I had. Often it helps to talk." He did not really expect a reply and he did not get one. "And of course your mother is here for you too."

All the same, he could not keep from trying again.

"Sometimes you think, Why me? But we all make the same mistakes usually. Everybody feels awkward sometimes."

At Paul's age, he thought, he would have been told: Offer it up. Redeem the world through your humiliations. He had always thought that brutal, but all at once it did not seem so bad. It was a way of making children believe their suffering could mean something.

In the darkness before his son's room he felt the vertigo of the shifting world. Stop, he thought. Go back. To the sweet order that had prevailed when life was innocent and carefree. Standing there, he could almost believe things had been that way. Of course there was still time.

S
HE FLEW
first class from Minneapolis on their money. They allowed her a small suite at the Mayflower and, for the last time, she thought, a uniformed chauffeur waited behind the security gate at Reagan National. She thought it might be a good idea to register the chauffeur's face. The day might come when she would be desperately avoiding him at airports, hiding. He was a huge-shouldered
cholo
with a Chac mask of a face.

As he put her single bag in the trunk, the thin lines of a smile displaced his stone god's countenance. He had permitted himself a small joke, a wee merry observation to amuse the pretty passenger. But Lara's Spanish, normally quite workable, failed her under the traffic noise, the takeoffs and landings in process all around them. Whatever he had said got by her. When he saw to his horror that his sally had fluttered and sunk, he swallowed his little smile, stuffed the remnants and odd angles of it back into the dusty earth of which his face was composed. His fierce black eyes flashed fear.

For the rest of the ride Lara tried, in various ways, to reassure him. The people he worked for disliked jokes in general, and unsuccessful jokes roused them to fury. They liked jokes to be theirs, at the expense of others; otherwise they sniffed disrespect and treachery, which they believed always accompanied the telling. Dealing with them, Lara was beginning to discover that humor, if it was not their sort, could represent humanity and mercy to the forces they served. It was preserving holy water against their infernal ambitions. Irony scattered them like rats, though never far enough.

The car drove her straight to the house in the Virginia hills. She wondered whether she would ever see the suite at the Mayflower; the prospect of spending the night entertaining her host in the big house was loathsome.

The place was a Greek Revival plantation home. It had spotless columns and pastures with similarly immaculate fences stretching to the foggy hills. There was a horse or two. She wondered if they might be Argentines. The green grass was icy and the reeds in the marshes stiff with frost. There were patches of unmelted snow at the north end of the pastures.

Lara was praying that the chauffeur had not been instructed to take her suitcase out of the trunk. He made no move to do so. A tall butler with an English face opened the door to her. She told him good afternoon.

His answer was in native Spanish. A cold greeting, something
para servirle.
They went into a long carpeted room with chandeliers and sofas. The tragic faces of Creole generals from the wars of liberation hung from the pale yellow walls. Someone had encouraged the old senator to sit for a portrait, which presented him like El Greco's inquisitor, with crumpled papers at his feet, shod in alligator boots. Undoubtedly sugar-quota bills to draw contributions for his election campaigns.

A woman appeared, a motherly sort, wearing a black apron and a belt full of keys.

"Only this bag?" she said of Lara's handbag. Lara handed it over. "Would you like to freshen up?"

The woman followed her up a flight of stairs to what Lara was displeased to see was a bedroom. It had a fine view of the grazing horses and the blue ridge.

"The bath is to your left, dear."

"I'll need my handbag."

"
No hay problema,
" said the woman with a smile. She snapped it shut and handed it over. Had she searched the bag for wires, weapons? In any case, she returned it.

"I thought I was staying at the Mayflower."

"
Claro que sí.
Tough to get accommodations there, but we did it."

They smiled at each other. There was no further searching.

"
Para servirle,
" the woman said.

Lara spent as little time as she could in front of mirrors. She did what she could to dull the scents of Northwest Airlines and made herself relax. The search, she reminded herself, was for cameras and recorders, not for weapons. It had not come to that.

All at once she found the mirror held her. She looked into her own dark, almost green eyes. On the island, in the parts where she was remembered, it was believed that Lara had no soul.

Many believed it. People said her dead brother kept her soul with him under the waters of All Saints Bay. In Guinee. They said that he had offered it to Marinette, the wild woman whose murderous rage had made her a
petro
goddess centuries ago. They said that Marinette occupied and enslaved her.

It was also speculated that her husband, a living man, the Red Frenchman, kept it; that Fidel himself, a
santero
and servant of Elegua, kept it in an emerald. Or that Marinette, in some spectral reversal, had taken it to Africa, where it labored digging for emeralds, to atone for Lara's family's mistreatment of their slaves, and that was why Lara always appeared tired and could not always remember the things that had happened or what she had done.

At the worst of times, when it seemed impossible, when she dreamed of La Marinette night after night, when she wanted to die, Lara went to the mirror and begged and laughed and cried for her soul. Sometimes she sang, French songs, African songs, Jim Morrison. Sometimes, like the servant she had seen that day, she had to swallow her songs. Once, in front of the mirror, she had tried to hang herself. Hard work, day and night, in the mirror without a soul.

There were times she could swear she did not appear there, when the person was unknown and the room some dreadful room adorned with coral fans and armor, altars to the Virgin and Child, or to other figures perhaps—Mamaye, Agwé, Elegua, Ogoun. Maroon saints, mutated Taino predators, their lizard tongues pressed against the mirror for a taste of the pale fishbelly white, her soul in Guinee.

There was one thing, one hope. No one had ever said her soul was forever lost to her, not forever. And there were times, plenty of times, when she did not believe such things at all. As a little girl it had been all right. The first few times, when she saw La Marinette or Guinee in her mirror in the years before, she had laughed. She had made it a game to terrorize the girls in her Swiss school, to make them see her as exotic, bad and dangerous. When she went back to the island, Sister Margaret Oliver, who had her own beliefs about the mysteries, told Lara not to worry.

On her way downstairs Lara saw portraits on the walls that had not been there during her last visit, the sort that looked painted from photographs. George Orwell. Arthur Koestler. A few patriarchal figures she did not recognize but who she guessed were Latin American military men. One might have been Pinochet.

Downstairs, something like a board meeting had been taking place. About a dozen men in Italian suits were drifting out of the conference room. There were Anglos, Hispanics, a few Afro-Latins. All were men, and a few she recognized. There was a young Haitian American who worked on the staff of a senator. Also a good-looking Cuban American lobbyist who, it was said, had written every line of nearly every bill introduced by certain members of Congress for the last ten years. His prose reflected the interests of his clients, who were frequently offshore corporations. The men stood in groups around the reception room while the butler ordered up their cars.

The Cuban approached her. Frightened as she was, it was good to see him. She always had a weakness for Cuban charm.

"Hi, Lara. Traveling south?"

She shrugged and kissed him.

"In a good cause, I hope."

"
Semana santa,
" she told him, for some reason.

"Shall I introduce you before everyone's gone?"

"No," she said. "It's hopeless."

He wished her
buena suerte.
She wished him the same. He held her eyes for a moment. She greeted the Haitian American Senate staffer, a young man of the elite. The two men turned away to speak with each other and another man she knew joined them, an American who represented some evangelical foundation.

"So," the Cuban American told his colleagues, "I said to them, Listen, you don't want that guy on the Foreign Relations Committee. Why? Hey, the guy's an Árabist. We want him out of there.
ûndale,
fucker."

"But Pablo," the smooth Haitian American said, "he's not an Arabist at all. It simply isn't true."

"I beg your pardon," the lobbyist said. "He wears little pointed shoes. I sat next to him on the subway. They curl up at the ends. He's a Muslim terrorist. His opponent is a God-fearing yokel,
un hombre muy formal.
This is the war on terror."

The American, a God-fearing yokel by profession, laughed agreeably. Lara, smiling, took a chair to wait for Triptelemos and tried to listen to other conversations. Men spoke in English, Spanish, French.

She saw some members of a scholarly organization that had flourished in the Reagan era. They were a remnant now, but once they'd had money and power to spare, and Lara, following her ex-husband's lead, had gone to work for them, attached herself after leaving the great Desmond Jenkins and the service of Soviet disinformation. By then, no one cared who had killed Hammarskjöld, that Mobutu dined on human flesh. South Africa was giving way, the truncheon falling from the Boer's ham hand. There was a slaughter of the Eritreans; Cuban soldiers brought AIDS home with their Orders of the Red Banner. Islam appeared, rampant.

She and her husband ended up assigned to a catchall outfit, run by fanatics, increasingly short on money and power, increasingly lawless. It had been a mistake; they had been badly handled by the French, who had no use for them and passed them to the Americans, by which time the Cold War in Africa had shrunk to a few plague spots of starvation and murder, marginal in the world's eye. But it was all she had been able to promote from the free world end of the great blighted battlefield of Phantom World War Three.

For his friends, the Haitian American read archly from the translated newsletter of a right-wing racial nationalist on a colonial island who reportedly had been receiving funds from every major intelligence agency in the world.

"It's called 'Le Message du Soleil," the young man explained, and read on:

"'The African sun alone was the quickener of the civilized instinct. From Africa, it spread to the Fertile Crescent. But,
hélas,
not before it attracted the attention of cold pale dwarfs, a stunted race, mean of size and frigid of heart. Cunning and cruel. I refer to those known to the world as Caucasoids, otherwise as
blancs.
The white race,
enfin!

"Present company excepted," the young Haitian paused to say.

"Wait a minute," one of the Americans said. "This is
our
guy?"

"Big tent, Arthur. Many mansions." The young man looked at them for leave to read on.

"'Yet the sun alone,'" he continued, "'was font and symbol of vitality. Thus, in an outburst of energy, one leader of the whites, perhaps the most gifted, took as his sign a dim stick figure of the sun. For what was the cross, my friends, if not the sun? And in his hands twisted it to its true likeness, to invoke the bright bounty of the great star itself.'