The Boiling Season (17 page)

As I began to lower the flashlight, an elderly woman threw herself against the man behind her, trying to get him to move.

When it was over, more than ten seconds had passed, but no one among them had bothered to count. Huddled together across the road, stretching down toward Cité Verd as far as I could see, they looked to one another for confirmation that they were safe now. There must have been hundreds of them, young and old. As if standing at the end of a drive were the most fascinating opportunity ever presented to them.

“Not a word of this to Madame,” I said to the houseboy. “Just let me know if they return.”

“As for you,” I said to the guards, “if I have to do your jobs for you again, you'll be joining them. Do you understand?”

With pitiful nods they showed they did.

As I hurried back to the pool, I wondered what I would have done if they had refused to move. The advantage of dealing with people like these was that they were easily fooled. But there was a danger as well—one never knew what they might do. Even the most well-trained dog will sometimes bite. President Mailodet had understood this better than anyone, and perhaps that was why his first response had always been brutality.

My greatest fear, upon returning to the party, was that word of what was happening at the gate had already reached the guests. To my added distraction, I could find Justice Charles nowhere. My only consolation was that our conversation, however brief, appeared to have made just as big an impression on him as it had on me.

Beside the buffet, a thin white man in wire-framed glasses was talking with a tall blonde in a bib of diamonds. “I can't stand the poverty back home,” the man was saying, “but at least here they can always pick fruit and vegetables if they get hungry.”

The woman nodded in agreement. “It's tropical poverty as opposed to cold poverty. In a place like this you hardly even feel it.”

A heavyset mulatto in a tuxedo leaned in behind the woman, skewering a shrimp with a firm, sharp jab. His thin, elegant lips were perched upon a long, prominent chin, and when he smiled he looked like a tulip blossoming. He swirled the shrimp in a pot of sauce. “If we are to postpone indulgences and luxury until the very last person on earth is fed and clothed,” the man pronounced in heavily accented English, “it would be a very boring world indeed.”

Thinking of the people I had known growing up, I nearly added that it would be a world in which no one would bother to feed or clothe himself, preferring to depend on handouts.

At the other end of the patio, Madame came walking up the steps from Villa Bacall, the remains of what must have been a small tour group trailing behind her. As she passed in front of one of the floodlights, I noted with worry the flush in her cheeks. She was carrying on a distracted conversation with the man walking beside her. In a few more steps they reached the pool, and the man suddenly turned in my direction. The moment I saw his face, I knew he was someone I had met before, but I could not place him. He was short and well rounded across the middle, looking weary and curiously uncomfortable, as if uncertain of the company in which he found himself.

For several minutes, I watched the man from afar. He kept tugging at the sleeves of his tuxedo, as if they were trying to escape to higher ground. Madame was called away, leaving the man standing by himself, surrounded by men and women in conversation, none of whom appeared to invite his participation. A waiter balancing a tray of glasses filled with punch stopped to offer the man a drink, and the man watched as the waiter lowered his tray. He took a long time considering the punch, staring blankly at the glasses, so long that the waiter's arm grew tired and he needed to use the back of a chair for support. When still the man was unable to decide, the waiter selected a glass for him, brusquely raising the tray back above his shoulder and rushing off.

Alone again, the man lifted the glass and took a small, indifferent sip. As he looked around at the crowd gathered on the patio, searching, it seemed, for a familiar face among these strangers, his eyes met mine. He looked at me as he always had, with condescension and a touch of boredom. But then in an instant—it must have been the moment he recognized me—the look turned to trepidation, and I saw just how badly the minister of health had aged.

He looked away from me then, reaching out for the elbow of a small mulatto woman who at that moment came up beside him. His wife was not a particularly attractive woman, but she had a kind face and she glanced up when he touched her, her fingers brushing against his. The gesture, it seemed to me, was meant to be comforting, and there was more behind it, I guessed, than I would ever know.

“Monsieur.” The same houseboy reached up to touch my arm. Did he have no idea how to comport himself around superiors?

“What?”

He froze at my glance.

“What do you want?” I repeated, losing patience.

He was almost breathless. “The president is here.”

The motorcade was still winding its way down the drive when I reached the front steps of the manor house. A few dozen people had gotten there before me, including some of the foreign guests, who stood in a clump, chatting with bored, lazy gestures, uncertain why they were there, regretting now that they had followed the rest of the crowd.

There were three cars traveling together down the drive, identical black sedans as graceful as cats. They slowed so gently—in perfect unison—that it was impossible to tell when they finally stopped moving. Even the foreigners halted their conversations.

The front and rear cars released their passengers first, eight bulky, unsmiling men in identical black suits and striped ties and sunglasses, pivoting their heads on rigid necks, like periscopes scanning the crowd.

Leaving her three investors at the top of the steps, Madame came forward alone. As she approached the middle car, one of the bodyguards reached out and opened the back door. An immense smile appeared on Madame's face. And then, in an instant, the smile cracked, like a delicate pane of glass. From out of the limousine emerged not the president but a pretty young mulatto woman with a string of pearls around her neck. Recovering quickly, Madame took the young woman's hand as it was offered and kissed her cheeks, each in turn.

The young woman was the president's niece, sent on his behalf. Mlle Duphay wore a sleeveless gown of cream-colored satin, accentuating the slightly darker hue of her skin. She was an elegant young woman of twenty-two, just returned to the country after several years studying abroad.

With two of her bodyguards at her side, Mlle Duphay joined Mme Freeman on a tour of the estate. Madame appeared distressed as they left, wringing her hands behind her back. I followed from a distance, hearing nothing of what passed between the two women. Mlle Duphay appeared to say little, merely nodding as Madame described what she was seeing.

From the manor house they went on to the guesthouse, and then down the steps to Villa Bardot. Presumably not wanting to exhaust the president's niece, Madame skipped the rest of the villas, leading her instead to the tennis courts and back around the manor house to the casino. I waited outside while they went in to see the tables. Then they came back out, moving on to the gardens, and I was halfway down the path behind them when one of the bodyguards suddenly stepped out from behind a bush and grabbed my arm.

“Who are you?” he said, crushing my bicep with little effort.

Looking into the lenses of his sunglasses, I saw only the reflection of some distant light. “I manage the estate.” As he offered nothing in response, I added I was eager to see that everything met Mademoiselle's approval.

“If it doesn't,” he said, giving my arm one final, painful squeeze, “I will personally make sure you're the first to know.”

Thinking I heard footsteps, I turned. The houseboy was running up the path.

“Monsieur,” he shouted. “I've been looking all over for you. There's been an accident.”

I nodded to the guard. “It was nice talking to you.”

Instead of releasing my arm, he did his best to throw it back at me, as if it were not attached.

T
he crowd at the gate began to thin as I approached, leaving only a few bodies huddled around a dark form sprawled in the gravel. In the beam of the flashlight I saw it was a young girl. Beside her an old woman was weeping as she held some sort of rag to the girl's head. The cloth was soaked in blood.

“It was one of the cars,” the houseboy said. “They didn't see her.”

“Where's the car?”

“They left.”

“Call an ambulance,” I said. “Quickly.” He took off running toward the manor house.

“I hope you're pleased with yourselves,” I yelled to the crowd. Once again, they had receded down the road, pretending they were not to blame.

Extinguishing the beam of the flashlight, I turned to the guards, watching from the doorway of their booth. “I warned them,” I said. “They have no one to blame but themselves.”

This far from the hospital, there was no chance the ambulance would arrive quickly enough. Soon our guests would be preparing to leave, and we could not let them see what had happened.

“We must move her,” I said to the guards. Along the shoulder, a few meters up the road, I found a patch of grass and cleared away the loose gravel. I ordered the houseboy to fetch a blanket.

“You can stay with her,” I said to the old woman. To the guards I said, “Get rid of everyone else. I don't care how.”

T
he manor house was silent, but for the murmur of the party down below. When I reached my office, I did not turn on the light. I merely sat at my desk, listening to the laughter and the tinkling of glasses. The shutters were open, and as I watched the treetops sweep against their starry backdrop, I thought about everything we had done to make Habitation Louvois possible. It had cost all of us—me, Mme Freeman, M. Guinee—but nothing important ever came cheaply. My father, with his stark morality, never understood. Sometimes things had to be sacrificed to achieve a greater good.

I do not know how long I sat there. It was the buzz of the telephone that brought me back. I immediately guessed that the ambulance had arrived. And I was relieved that they had come so discreetly, without lights or siren.

But I was mistaken; it was one of the guards calling to let me know the girl was dead.

“T
he hotel is magnificent,” Mlle Duphay said, arriving at poolside after the tour was over. “Finally we have something no other country has.”

Breathless and dusty, I got there just in time to see Madame's smile. I think it no coincidence that the first person she turned to in search of a witness was me. She knew as well as I did that the credit went to both of us, that we had done all of this together.

In that instant, all the evening's complications evaporated.

Mme Freeman was so pleased she seemed to forget her disappointment—that it was the president's niece and not the president himself she was speaking to. They were words that over the next several months I would hear Madame repeat upon the arrival of nearly every guest at the hotel. “I think you'll see,” she would say, “that we have something here that you'll find nowhere else in the world.”

Mlle Duphay did not stay long that night, and her departure marked the end of the evening for most of the local guests. Madame and the three white men in tuxedoes stood at the top of the manor house stairs, receiving thanks and congratulations as the chauffeurs readied the cars. I was off to the side, watching the procession, when I happened to glance over and see someone standing on the darkened tennis courts.

I do not believe the minister of health saw me coming, for he seemed surprised to hear my voice.

“As you can see,” I said, “they're not quite done. The surface is far too pebbly.”

The minister of health nodded, allowing a long silence to pass. “I hadn't noticed until now.”

“Do you still play?”

He turned his back to me, making his way slowly to the net. I saw him frown as he tested the tautness. Even in so simple a gesture I detected a hesitancy that had never been there before. It was clear, I realized, looking at him now, that he had aged far more than the eight years that had passed since his weekly matches with Senator Marcus. There was no going back to the man who cursed at any ball that dared score against him.

“Do you see much of Senator Marcus?” I asked.

The minister of health sighed. “I should get back to my wife. She's waiting.”

We started back together, but by the time we had arrived he had far outpaced me, and he never looked back. His wife was on the steps speaking with Madame, and the former minister of health went up to join them. He and Madame brushed cheeks, and then he was gone.

Chapter Twelve

I
t was still dark when I awoke the next morning. Not wanting to break the silence, I dressed slowly, leaving the lights extinguished. Crossing the corridor to the stairs, I could scarcely see. But I already knew the way, step by step. At the door to M. Gadds's room I paused, turning my ear to confirm that he was still asleep.

As I descended, following the curve of the stairs, I took in the lobby below, lit from without as if by a bulb draped in thick, black felt. From a distance the evening's disarray appeared to have been set to order: the floors shone as if newly washed; the trays and plates and glasses had been returned to the kitchen. After the party ended, before going up to bed, I had offered to oversee the cleaning. M. Gadds had refused, insisting it was his responsibility.

However clean the lobby had looked from the top of the stairs, from the bottom I could see everything they had missed. Beside the entrance a thick black smudge climbed the plaster, left by the shoe of someone casually leaning against the wall. Several broken flower stems poked out of the vase beside the front desk. I could see where someone had pulled out a blossom, dislodging the others in the process, so that now they stood inches taller than they should have. And how careless, I thought, as my eyes fell upon the two chaises longues—the maids had incorrectly paired each with the other's pillows.

In the library and the ballroom and the restaurant I observed a number of similar oversights. But they were nothing compared to what I found outside. The buffet tables were still in place by the pool. Mounds of cigarette butts huddled in the underbrush, as if swept there on purpose. Reaching into a gaping hole in a shrub behind the pavilion, I discovered an empty bottle of champagne, smears of frosty pink lipstick circling the mouth.

The courtyard outside Villa Bardot was a mess. Not a single piece of patio furniture was where it was supposed to be. At the door, someone had abandoned a red sequined dress. The tables and chairs I moved one at a time, careful not to make a sound. I folded the dress as best I could.

In the other courtyards I found more of the same.

With the first true light of dawn at my back, I followed the last of the paths to the end, reaching the entrance to the preserve. In a glance I could see the party had not made it this far.

There was a bench at the fork just up the trail, and I decided to take a moment's rest before heading back. Soon everyone else would be awake, and the day's business would begin in earnest.

I had gone just a few steps into the preserve when I spotted someone up ahead, sitting on that very bench, head slightly tilted, staring absently at the trees. I could scarcely believe my eyes. In all my time here I had never encountered anyone this far from the manor house. The light was poor, and I could make out little more than a silhouette. I moved a little closer. Hearing my footsteps, she looked over and smiled, and I was relieved to see it was Madame.

“You don't look happy to see me,” she said.

“Just surprised.”

“I should have known you would be up at this hour,” she said. “Even the birds are still sleeping.”

“I wanted to make sure everything was in order before the guests arise.”

She slid over on the bench, patting the space beside her. “It was quite a party, wasn't it?”

Not long ago I might have been reluctant to sit, not wanting to give her the wrong impression, but it was clear that of late our relationship had begun to change.

“It looked like everyone was having a very good time,” I said, sitting down.

“It was a success. A wonderful success.”

“I couldn't be more pleased.”

“You must think them strange,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“They're good people,” she said. “I don't know them all, of course, but I know their type. Some people think them shallow.”

“The few I spoke with were very kind. Justice Charles, for instance.”

“They enjoy the things other people don't have. They can afford to pay to experience things other people can't.”

“Anyone would do the same, if they could.”

“There's a certain value in such people,” Madame said, leaning back comfortably. “Taken to excess it can seem decadent, but without people like these there would be no preserving things of value. What would happen to the great art of the world if there was no one who could afford to collect it? Who do you think gives the museums their money?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Art would not survive.”

“What would have happened to this place,” she said, “if we had not come here? You only need to look around to see what we're up against.”

From where we sat it was impossible to see the barren hills surrounding us or the slum to the west, but I knew that was what she meant. And then there were all the things beyond, the capital and the National Palace, the garrisons and endless ghettos, the violence—the things I had left behind that she scarcely knew.

“So tell me,” she said, “is everything in order?”

I wished in that moment that I could tell her everything was fine. But how could I lie, after she had just spoken to me with such honesty?

I told her about the smudge on the plaster and the cushions and the things I found outside. She winced when I showed her the champagne bottle I was still carrying, which I had filled with cigarette butts. But I left out my discovery of the red-sequined dress lying in front of Villa Bardot.

“I don't know what I'd do,” Madame said, “if I didn't have you looking out for these things.”

“I consider it my duty.”

For several minutes more we sat in silence, each of us enjoying the majesty of the jungle spread out before us. However imposing it seemed, we could never afford to forget its true fragility, that we were the only thing standing between it and oblivion.

When it was time to go, I walked Madame back to her villa, and I went on to the manor house. M. Gadds had only just come down from his rooms, his hair wet with tonic. On the front desk I deposited the bottle and its filthy cargo.

M. Gadds glanced at it with disgust. “Get that off of there.”

“It's for you,” I said. “I would never want Madame to think you missed anything.”

T
hat M. Gadds and I were not destined to be friends was made clear early on. He had come to us highly recommended, having worked for more than two decades at some of the finest resorts in the world. I never knew where M. Gadds was from originally; in addition to French, he spoke German and Italian and English, all of them with an accent I could not quite place. M. Gadds was a generation older than me, and I could tell he felt it impertinent for me to ask him personal questions. He had fair skin and glassy blue eyes and short, thinning hair he slicked back and parted through the middle, creating a broad path straight to the bald clearing at the back of his head. He was always immaculately dressed in silk shirts and cashmere jackets, and he was never seen without a brightly colored handkerchief arranged in his breast pocket.

He had tried to negotiate, as one of the terms of his contract, that my rooms—the largest in the manor house—be given over to him. Of course, Madame would not hear of it. I was not someone who could simply be cast aside.

Whether it was because of this or some other injustice, I do not know, but thereafter M. Gadds let it be known that he saw me as a rival, and he sought out every opportunity to try to undermine me. Whenever Madame was present, M. Gadds found an excuse for pointing out some gap in my knowledge of the hotel business, an expertise he had spent his entire life attaining.

“Fear not,” he bravely offered whenever he had a chance, “I shall take him under my wing.”

The first few times this happened, I took him at his word, for I was eager to learn everything I could. But of course, he had no intention of teaching me anything. In fact, M. Gadds enforced a strict separation between his responsibilities and mine, hoping thereby to preserve my inexperience. If that was as he wished it, there was little I could do, other than remind him that I was not the only one with something to learn.

A
lthough I found satisfaction in what we had achieved with the opening of the hotel, there were parts of my old life I grew to miss.

It soon became obvious, for instance, that my quiet days spent exploring the estate—and my hours of restful contemplation—were gone forever. Now my days were a constant string of demands. No matter how much help we had, it was never enough. There was always one group of men doing this, another group doing that, and a dozen more projects standing by. To me, every task was important, because behind each of them was a guest we could not afford to disappoint. To that end, our greatest obstacle was the men themselves, whose every task, no matter how simple, had to be carefully supervised. It was the only way to ensure they did as they were told, and did it without dallying. I had no choice but to spend my days—and quite often, my nights—rushing from one corner of the estate to the other.

I often spent the few minutes of free time I managed to secure resting in the chair on my balcony. In the afternoon I could count on there being a tennis match or two to watch on the courts below. We were too long a drive from the capital to attract many regulars from the island, so our players mostly changed from week to week, as new guests arrived and old ones left. But there was one man, a local, who played with some regularity. Unlike most of the others, he displayed little seriousness toward his matches, often standing at the net joking when he should have been serving. His play was lackadaisical and he was always first to congratulate his opponents whenever they scored a difficult point. He was older and portly, skin a light shade of brown, and each time he stepped onto the court I imagined I was seeing my old employer, Senator Marcus. Even though I knew it could not be him, the sight always brought me comfort, for it carried to mind a picture of the Senator as I remembered him best, and it helped me to believe that, wherever he was, he had found happiness and a new kind of peace.

Aside from tennis, most of the activity at Habitation Louvois came at night, as our guests descended upon the manor house in their evening attire, ready to feast. After dinner there was always a band at the pavilion and champagne by the lighted pool. The discotheque was a favorite of our younger guests, who went inside to dance and then snuck back out later to entwine themselves under the starlight. Sometimes I awoke in the night to the sound of their laughter.

But they were not the only ones staying up until dawn. Not infrequently did my morning inspection of the grounds bring me upon middle-aged businessmen struggling to make it back to their villas with their jacket pockets stuffed with chips. There were guests who spent their entire trip hunched over craps tables and roulette wheels, never seeing the sun. We learned to accommodate whatever our guests wished, no matter how peculiar. Although most of the staff never knew who our guests were, they knew to treat everyone with deference. Because of my position, I was often aware of who had arrived and who we were expecting, and occasionally there were faces I recognized from a magazine.

My principal disappointment was that I saw so little of Madame. She came to Habitation Louvois whenever she could, but business back home more often kept her away. Through regular letters I let her know what was happening here. From M. Gadds she received financial reports, but she counted on me for the details of daily life, which was what kept the place alive for her in her absence. She understood that no one knew the estate like I did, and there was no one she trusted more. That was why, when she was here, she made a point of meeting me each morning at our bench in the preserve, before she went to see M. Gadds.

Never on these mornings did we see anyone else in the preserve. For the guests, it was too wild a place; they preferred their pools and the cultivated garden paths. Since only the two of us ever visited it, the preserve grew to feel like our private sanctuary. We joked about it sometimes, saying that if anything were to happen to us there, no one would ever find us. But of course, nothing bad could ever happen there. As only the two of us understood, it was the most peaceful part of the entire estate.

W
hile the hotel itself continued to cater mostly to foreign visitors, within months of opening, the restaurant had come to be regarded throughout the capital as the finest on the island, far eclipsing the Hotel Erdrich. Chef Jean and his menu were the talk of Lyonville. On any given night, half the tables were filled with politicians and businessmen negotiating deals over oysters and escargot.

One summer night toward the end of our first year, I was passing through the dining room and out of the corner of my eye I saw someone waving at me. It was dark in the corner where he was sitting—the table lit by a single flickering candle—and as I approached, he bounded up from his seat and met me with a crushing embrace.

“Look who it is,” Paul cheered as he clapped me on the back. “This is Alexandre, the guy I was telling you about.” As he turned us toward the table, he stumbled, misjudging where the floor should be.

A pretty young woman wearing a sour expression glanced up reluctantly. Disturbed from their meals by Paul's outburst, many of the diners at the tables around us sat with their forks midway to their mouths, watching us with curious displeasure.

I gestured for Paul to sit.

“This is Claudette,” Paul said in a voice that was much too loud. The young woman extended her fingers. She could have been no older than twenty-two—more than a decade younger than he—but she seemed not the least bit uncomfortable here, as though she had spent her whole life eating in restaurants like this. She was dressed in an expensive purple satin dress, and her ears held diamond studs. Well above her plunging neckline a gold chain rested against her bronze skin. Her complexion was much lighter than Paul's. Her features were both delicate and firmly precise.