The Boiling Season (27 page)

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-One

S
itting on my balcony watching the dusk fall, I happened to look down, and there they stood on the lawn below, trespassing without any apparent fear they might get caught, without any trace of impropriety. Dragon Guy stood in the middle, dressed as before, shirtless in his dirty white linen suit. He had his back to me, and I recognized the breadth of his shoulders and the peculiar shape of his head, oblong as a gourd and shaved equally smooth. The woman to Dragon Guy's right stood a full head above him; the man to his left, half a head shorter. Black Max. The estate was laid out before them, and to me they looked like surveyors come to measure the dimensions of their future.

And then Dragon Guy turned, as if suddenly remembering the house behind him. He glanced up, his hand raised to brush aside the sun. He saw me in my chair; I know because he nodded in acknowledgment. Then just as quickly he turned his back to me again.

Down the stone steps they went, Dragon Guy in the lead. Through the trees I could just barely see the red cloth wrapped around the woman's head—and just above it, the roof of Villa Bardot with its canopy of banana leaves. A long, still silence crept along, and then in the quiet I heard what sounded like a set of jalousies opening. And then that overwhelming silence again. For the length of a breath, I forgot they were intruders. For just a moment—a strange, feverish moment—Dragon Guy and his companions were our guests. Another table, I thought to myself, would need to be set for dinner. And I waited for one of the porters—whose names I could no longer remember—to appear with Dragon Guy's bags. But of course, there were no more porters, no more bags, no more guests.

Why did I not go after them? Why did I not go down to Villa Bardot and insist they leave? Perhaps I felt I owed him something. Perhaps I thought it would do no good. Whatever the reason, I did not go. Mona had just brought my coffee, and the warmth of the cup spread calm through my fingertips. I decided it would be best to wait.

That night I wrote to Madame, but I saw no reason to mention Dragon Guy. She would only grow alarmed, and without cause. He will have vanished, I told myself, even before I can post the letter.

“Dear Madame,” I wrote,

I am very pleased to report that at last we have fixed all of the plumbing problems. A week ago we found the obstruction in the fountain to which I referred in my letter of several months past. The unfortunate delay was a result of the plumber, whom we finally had to replace. Despite the setbacks, all is now well. The fountain was of course a minor concern in comparison to many other projects that have been waiting longer for attention, but knowing how fond you are of it, I wanted to see to it that the necessary repairs were made immediately, before your return. I have been assured that the roofing tiles for Villa Leigh and Villa Bernhardt will arrive before the rainy season begins in earnest. As always, I hope your affairs at home are coming to a quick resolution. We await your return and the resumption of business here.

* * *

At breakfast the next morning I took care to reveal nothing to the others about what I had seen the night before. Hector came downstairs late. He had been living with us for four months now, and he had quickly developed a taste for the comforts of a genuine bed. The only problem was getting him out of it at a reasonable hour.

As was her way, Mona had been vocal in her displeasure at the arrangement, confronting me the morning after Hector's first night in the manor house. She was waiting for me the moment my foot touched down in the lobby, her mouth twisted with a sourness she had clearly spent hours savoring.

“Why is he sleeping on silk sheets, and I'm on a wool tick out back?”

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “He's only a boy. He needs someone to look after him.”

“Fine,” Mona said, whipping a towel from her shoulder with a snap. “You can look after his sheets too.”

Raoul of course had said nothing. I could have made him sleep on the dirt, and he never would have thought to complain.

In the four months that had passed since, Mona had softened none of her objections. True to her word, she refused to clean Hector's sheets. Instead, the boy was left to wash them himself, a task I made sure he undertook weekly. I knew he saw such matters of hygiene as the most tedious of chores, but few things were more important.

But the project to which we together devoted the bulk of our time was his schooling. He would never make a better life for himself, I explained, until he learned to read and write. To accommodate his studies, I lessened his workload. In the morning he attended to whatever needed to be done, allowing us to spend the heat of the afternoon in the library, practicing his letters and sounding out words. As I had known he would, he had already made tremendous progress.

Even though I was certain Hector had not left the manor house the night before, during his brother's sudden appearance, I regarded him carefully when he arrived in the kitchen for breakfast. That I found no sign of distance or preoccupation merely confirmed what should have been obvious: Dragon Guy was not the sort of man to tell anyone anything he did not need to know, especially not his younger brother. And Hector had made it clear through his words and his presence here that he did not want any part in his brother's dealings.

“Well,” I said when the last of the coffee had been drunk, “we all have work to do.”

I sent Hector into town to check on the roofing tiles. It had been weeks since I had heard anything.

While Mona attended to things in the kitchen, and Raoul to the grounds, I slipped quietly outside and down the steps to the villas below.

The shutters to Villa Bardot were closed, and on the patio I could see no sign of intruders. In fact, what visible evidence there was pointed to the opposite, a long period without visitors of any kind. The pool in the courtyard was dry. A cracked terra-cotta pot lay on its side on the terrace, the spilled soil long since washed away. The talonlike remains of the plant inside were no longer recognizable.

I put my ear to the door, but I could hear nothing inside. As I strained to pick up the slightest whisper of Dragon Guy, my mind instead conjured up the once ubiquitous whir of ceiling fans, the hum of the pumps in the swimming pools. There is no greater silence than the absence of familiar sounds. If I visited each and every one of the villas, I knew I would find more of the same.

Dragon Guy had left, as I had known he would. But still, that he had gotten onto the grounds at all was troubling. It could only mean that he had somewhere managed to breach the wall. My debt to the young man did not amount to an open invitation to return whenever he wished.

We needed two hours to determine that in the vicinity of the manor house nothing had been compromised. I told Raoul we were undertaking a routine inspection, something I had been planning for months. I left out any mention of Dragon Guy. Raoul did as I asked. Being, however, unaware of the urgency, he did so without enthusiasm. I frequently had to control my own anxiety to avoid arousing his suspicion.

But with the grounds so heavily wooded, large portions of the wall proved inaccessible, frustrating much of our efforts. After several hours, we discovered that a coconut palm had fallen upon the wall near the southernmost villas—a likely casualty of the storm a month before. Even there, though, the stones had held. Wanting to take no chances, I sent Raoul for the ax, and I carried on alone.

A short distance into the forest preserve, I reached the fork where the main trail branched off into several smaller ones. As I stood there considering which direction I might choose, I could not help thinking of Madame and of our morning meetings there on the bench. I could imagine her still, in her recklessly long yellow dresses, which somehow remained yellow despite the untidiness of the paths. And her giant stick, the wood as dark as pitch, and heavier than anything I would have thought her capable of carrying. I knew I must do anything I could to ensure that nothing more happened here to put the estate at risk.

The realization came to me quickly that none of the trails in the preserve would bring me close enough to the perimeter for me to be able to get to the wall. And I could see already that the inspection would take several days to complete, and repairs several more. In the meantime, there would be little to keep Dragon Guy from coming back.

W
hen I returned to the manor house, I could hear Hector in the kitchen talking to Mona. He was telling her a story about one of his friends, but he could not stop laughing long enough for me to make any sense of it. He was a puzzle to me, this boy who stubbornly persisted in being so carefree. Every day the only world he had ever known fell a little bit more to pieces, and he responded with a smile. It occurred to me that he was more than a little like Paul. They both had an abiding faith that things would always work out for the best. I could only hope that Hector put his faith to better use.

“He wasn't home,” Hector said when I asked about the tiles.

“Where is he?”

He looked at me with a crooked smile, as if expecting me to see the absurdity of the question. “How should I know?”

“Go see if Raoul needs help,” I said, and I told him about the fallen tree. “When you finish, come see me. Our lesson today will have to be brief. I have another important job for you.”

Hector hopped to his feet and drained the glass with an untidy glug.

“Mona,” I said once he was gone, “I'll need you to clean up Villa Bardot.”

She looked up from her chopping in annoyed surprise. “Are you expecting guests?”

“Just please see to it,” I said. I told her I would take lunch in my office.

D
espite the exhausting work of cutting up and carting away the fallen tree, Hector appeared restless. He sat impatiently at the edge of the chair opposite my desk, looking as though he might at any moment spring out.

“Do you remember where we left off yesterday?”

Hector wrenched the book from somewhere in the back of his pants. It was folded nearly in half, the pages torn and stained with sweat.

“What happened to the cover?” I asked, reaching out for the book.

“It fell off.”

“Where? Perhaps we can fix it.”

Hector shrugged. “It got lost.”

“Maybe you should leave the book here between lessons,” I said. “Before it gets completely destroyed.”

Hector snatched the book from my grip. “It's mine.”

“But why do you need to have it with you when you're out on the grounds, getting filthy?”

“We take breaks,” he said. “I practice.”

I smiled to show him I was pleased, but he continued to eye me warily, as if convinced I would once again try to take it away.

The book was by no means precious. I had found it in a box full of things guests had left behind over the years, a small, cheaply made paperback. Judging from the few pages I had read with Hector, it was a silly tale about an encounter between a downed pilot lost in the desert and a boy from outer space. I assumed it must have belonged to a child. Ridiculous, but it was the only thing I had on hand that Hector stood any chance of deciphering.

“Show me what you've been practicing.”

Momentarily lowering his guard, Hector fanned through the pages, racing forward and then tracking back, until he found the one he was looking for. It was not far from the beginning.

“Go ahead,” I said.

Hector ran his tongue across his lips. “Please,” he sounded out slowly. “Draw . . . me . . . a . . . sheep.”

“Very good,” I said. “Go on.”

Hector read another line or two, and then I asked if there were any words he had come across that he did not understand.

“What's an . . . app-a-ri-tion?”

“It's something like a vision,” I said. “Something that appears as if out of nowhere.”

“Oh.”

I slid a piece of paper before him. “Let's try some letters.”

Despite my best efforts, Hector still liked to clench a pencil as though it were a machete. “Like this,” I showed him, positioning it between his fingers.

Tongue stabbing out of the corner of his mouth, he sketched out “H-E-C-T-O—.” He had some trouble with the R, leaving the legs too far apart.

Placing my hand on top of his, I showed him how to pull the loop and legs together, making it tight. Then he tried again on his own.

“Good,” I said. “Very good. But I'm afraid that's all we have time for today.”

He looked at me glumly.

“We'll do more soon, I promise. But today I have a special job for you. Something very important. I need you to examine the wall around the estate,” I said. “And when I say examine, I don't mean that you should find a spot in the shade to lie with one of your girlfriends.”

Hector laughed happily, forgetting his disappointment. He was thrilled with the idea of being taken for a Casanova.

“There is only one way for you to do this,” I said, “and that is to walk the perimeter. I have reason to believe the wall has come down somewhere.” His expression had turned perfectly blank. It was true—Dragon Guy had not told him.

“I want you to find out where,” I said. “It will be much quicker for you to do this from the outside. In some places you'll need to cut your own path, so bring a machete. But you should bring one anyway. You never know what you might run into outside.”

“I know very well what I'll run into.”

“I'm pleased to hear it,” I said. “Then I expect you to accomplish this without any trouble. And if you find anything, let me know immediately.”

I walked him over to the door and placed my hand on his head. “The daylight is half gone. You have only a few hours until curfew.”

A
s I sat that evening on the balcony, going over the accounts, I could not help gazing out upon the grounds and observing that our once immaculate resort appeared now like a primitive settlement overtaken by jungle. Of course, this in itself was not new, but perhaps I already had a sense of foreboding about Dragon Guy, and it was causing me to reflect on the tenuousness of our existence here. Nor was it the first time the estate had faced such decay. Yet while I knew from experience that the damage could be undone, with each day our chances for a reversal were slipping further out of reach. I could not let them slip away completely. I could not bear the thought of letting Mme Freeman down, not after all the belief she had shown in me.