The Boiling Season (30 page)

But then to my consternation Dragon Guy came to life, stirring as I approached. It was as if he had been waiting there for me.

“Good morning, monsieur,” he said in that incongruously soft voice of his. He pulled himself up into a sitting position. “This is quite a place you have here.”

He leaned forward, and the flaps of his jacket opened. There again was his tattoo, an angry, skulking smear of color slathered across his chest. Whereas before I had caught just a glimpse, now I was granted a view of its full, terrible glory. It was green and red and blue and black, spiraling from his heart and sliding who-knew-how-far down past the waistline of his pants. A dragon, of course.

Seeing me staring, he took hold of his lapels and pulled the jacket all the way open, past his shoulders, and it slid down his back, leaving only his forearms covered. “You can come closer, if you want.”

Even from where I stood the details were astonishing: individual scales that appeared to burst from his skin, and white, daggered teeth that were wet with saliva. The dragon's head was turned toward the left, belching a torrent of flame down Dragon Guy's arm.

Only now, as I looked more closely, did I see a few imperfections, spots where the ink seemed displaced or discolored. Without meaning to, I did take another step toward him, and I realized the flaws were not in the tattoo, but in the skin underneath. There were scars everywhere. Not just beneath the dragon, but on Dragon Guy's unpainted right side as well, from his collarbone to his belly and all up and down his arms. I could not conceive of where he had gotten them all. A man could not survive so many wounds. And he was in only his early twenties.

“When I was younger,” he said, pressing gingerly on one of the jagged tracks, “I was reckless.”

Younger?
I thought. Starting when he was still on his mother's breast? “And now?”

“I'm grateful every day to be alive. Aren't you?”

Despite my failure to supply an answer, he nodded somberly, as if we were the sort of men who could agree on a great many things.

“When I was young I wasted a lot of time.” He wrinkled his nose in my direction, giving his nostrils a flare. “What do you think when you look back on how you've spent your life?”

“Are you a therapist, too?”

Dragon Guy folded his arms across his chest and held himself for a moment in an awkward embrace. From where I stood, it looked as if he were strangling the dragon.

I realized I should stick with simpler words if I wished for him to follow. “What do you want?”

He came toward me slowly, dragging his fingers sleepily across the top of his head. He had that gift, so common among thugs and murderers and despots—that calm facade of humanity that obscured his true ruthlessness. He could be terrifying and charming all at the same time. “Want?”

“What do you expect to accomplish with this army of yours?”

He seemed to find the question funny, laughing with his eyes. “It's not an army.”

“No?”

He looked at me with an infuriating earnestness. “It's just people.”

“People with guns.”

He shrugged, still smiling. “Sometimes people need guns.”

We had clearly reached the limits of his philosophy.

“What about your brother?” I asked. “Why couldn't you let him be?”

“Hector made his decision.”

“Bullshit,” I spat.

Dragon Guy shrugged. “You wanted him to be like you. You wanted to turn him into a gentleman. This is no place for a gentleman.”

“Maybe not out there.” I gestured toward Cité Verd. “But it is in here.”

Dragon Guy glanced around the lobby, a bemused look on his face. “Did you really think your world was different from mine?”

“I know it was,” I said. “It still is.”

Dragon Guy sauntered over to the open door of the library. “There's only one thing we want,” he said, gazing lazily inside. “We want democracy. We want to be able to live in peace.”

“What about my peace?”

“You're one of us now,” he said. “Aren't you?”

I had to look up to meet his eyes. “You know very well that I'm not.”

“No,” he admitted. “I guess not. You still belong to that white woman.”

“I don't belong to anyone.”

He exhaled deeply, and his cold breath swept across my brow. “In that case, monsieur, I feel very sorry for you.”

At the door Black Max was waiting. Upon reaching him, Dragon Guy placed his hand on his partner's shoulder and leaned in to whisper something. They descended the stairs together, and I could sense that they had already decided my fate.

T
hat night, guns tore through the valley with the strength of a hurricane, and I awoke with a chill, thinking not of Hector nor of Raoul, nor even of Dragon Guy, but of Madame's orchid garden. It had been months, I realized, since anyone had tended to it.

For the rest of the night, as the sky above the trees flickered and trembled, the idea would not leave me. Against Dragon Guy's drive to destroy the estate, the garden was as good a place as any to take a stand.

The next morning, I was sitting on the terrace drinking coffee and looking through one of Madame's old gardening books. The pages were sweeping past me in a blur, and I had begun to feel increasingly sorry for the flowers, with me as their only hope. My appreciation for green and wild things was unmatched by any kind of skill or instinct for caring for them. Even with the vegetables and herbs I had tended during the period before the hotel opened, it had been a struggle for survival. As with everything else, whatever my father had learned during his childhood in the fields, I had failed to inherit.

I finished my coffee, and I was about to give up when I happened to raise my eyes and glance off toward the pool, and that was when I saw Raoul, dressed as always in his denims and his blue plaid shirt. He stood with his back to me, partially bent over, as if studying his reflection in the water. When I yelled his name, he seemed not to hear. I yelled again and he straightened up, reaching around to ease the pain in his back. Then he began to walk away from me down the path, his unbuttoned shirt trailing behind him. Gazing up at the sky as he went, his steps slow and tentative, he appeared lost. I called out to him again as I hurried down the steps. But by the time I reached the pool, I had lost sight of him. I called out again. There was no response, not even the crunch of footsteps trailing away down the path.

“I don't need you,” I yelled. If need be, I would save the estate entirely on my own.

F
or the next several days I dedicated myself to the orchids, spending all of the morning and much of the afternoon in the garden, weeding and cleaning away dead leaves and flowers. It was difficult at first, but I found the work largely peaceful. Aside from the distant gurgling of the water pump for the pool, I was surrounded by silence. Often, as I worked, I found myself putting down my tools and turning my head to listen whenever I heard a sound, no matter how faint. At least once a day I thought I heard someone approaching, but I could never be sure if it was that or something else, or if it was entirely in my imagination. I began to wonder if it was Hector, wanting to be near me but afraid of getting caught. After all these weeks apart, maybe he was realizing the mistake he had made. Maybe he was looking for a way to come back.

I
was pleased to be able to write to Madame about the progress I was making.

Of course, I am too poor a gardener to give the orchids the full care they deserve, but already I can see the results of my efforts. The flowers are happier now, and each morning I can feel their relief at seeing me return. They may not fully appreciate my skill, but they cannot help but acknowledge my commitment. I will be sorry when Raoul completes his current tasks and is able to take over their care once again.

On the day I finished my work in the orchid garden, I was in the shed putting away the tools, and once again I thought I could hear the sound of footsteps approaching. For several minutes, until well after the sound went away, I stayed inside, looking out the window. No one was there.

The path to Villa Moreau was badly overgrown, and it was difficult to move without brushing against vines and low-hanging branches. I had to go slowly, ducking and squeezing around the foliage, making as little noise as possible. I was sure this was the direction from which the sound had come.

As I neared a bend in the path, I saw a flash of color and something suddenly came rushing toward my head. There was a cutting buzz through the air, a blur, and I threw out my hands in defense, tearing my thumb on a thorn.

I opened my eyes. A hummingbird rose from a hibiscus blossom with a gentle thrum, hovering there a moment before zipping back across the path. A tiny bird, nothing more.

Villa Moreau lay fifty meters away, hidden by trees. From forty meters I could see a corner of the roof, and I began to approach even more cautiously. At thirty meters the view was no better. At twenty I spotted a shutter covering one of the windows. At ten I could just peek into the empty courtyard.

What surprised me most was the quiet. I could no longer hear the sound that had drawn me here; I could hear nothing at all. Perhaps it was the quiet that lulled me into ignoring the danger of what I was doing. I kept going, turning off the path and down the steps, and then I stood in the courtyard, several paces from the empty pool, and I could see the jalousies of Villa Moreau and its three neighbors, and I could tell none of them had been opened.

It was thus by accident that I discovered Hector had lied when he said Dragon Guy had taken over all of the villas. In fact, in the coming days I learned he had occupied only those to the west and north. But why? The only difference was their proximity to the manor house. It was as if he were afraid of getting too close to me.

I felt something that had been constricting my chest for weeks suddenly loosen ever so slightly.

Around and around the four villas I crept, circling them one at a time, pacing up and down the paths. I had no idea what I was looking for, and yet I was certain there was something here to be found.

A few minutes later I was staring off into the trees surrounding Villa Moreau, beyond which lurked our once-impenetrable wall. It occurred to me that this was the very place where Raoul and I, while looking for the spot where the wall had been breached, had come upon the fallen tree. Fearing damage to the wall, I had ordered Raoul and Hector to remove the tree. In order to do so, they had been forced to clear a path.

It was to the path that my mind immediately raced.

Before I realized what I was doing, I had thrown myself at the brush. In an instant I was through.

There was the path, just as they had left it, only mildly overgrown.

The path, I now discovered—as if I had known all along—led not just to where the tree had fallen, but to a clearing along the wall, a spot where the ground was barren of trees and underbrush. The clearing was in fact more like a corridor; although narrow, it continued for some distance, before coming to an end in a cul-de-sac of densely packed trees just behind Villa Bacall. Villa Bacall was in one of the groups of villas just south of Villa Moreau, and it was one of the villas in which Dragon Guy's men were living.

Without meaning to, I had discovered a secret passageway behind enemy lines.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I
n the beginning I went out each morning at dawn. Camouflaged among the trees, I watched the courtyard outside Villa Bacall. Each morning I waited hours, sometimes until the early afternoon, before anyone appeared.

Having spent the night fighting, they were apparently not inclined to be early risers.

After a few days, I changed my approach. I began arriving in the afternoon, giving them time to rest. Crouched still and silent, I felt like a predator lying in wait of his prey. Although, in every other way, I continued to feel it was the other way around, that I was the one being hunted.

Eventually, a few at a time, they would shuffle outside with yawns and scratches and commence building fires in the courtyard. They had constructed a ring of stone not far from the pool. In it they tossed their trash and kindling and anything they found in the villas that did not suit their fancy: picture frames, shelves, hangers, drawers, even the doors of cupboards. When it came to fuel, they seemed to have a special fondness for books.

In one of the villas lived several middle-aged women. I had not been expecting women, and their presence was anything but a pleasant surprise. The last thing I had wanted to find were further signs that they were already pursuing domestic arrangements.

The women seemed to be in charge of an enormous tin pot they kept on one side of the fire. They had flat iron pans for cassava bread, and there was a wooden pestle and mortar with which they ground corn.

They had cut down some of the trees and shrubs around the villas to make room for small vegetable gardens. Now I knew at least one of the ways in which they were getting food.

Over the course of several days I counted approximately two dozen people in all, five or six for Villa Bacall and each of its three neighbors. From my spot among the trees I could hear more voices, more activity in the villas to the west and north. In my head I did the math: if what I saw here were the same elsewhere, there must be more than two hundred of them.

I came later and later in the day, after everyone had already come outside. I watched the women working in the gardens and I saw men returning from somewhere with baskets loaded with breadfruit and avocados, buckets with water. Their conversations were as dull as anything one might overhear passing through the market.

Everywhere I looked, men and boys with rigid faces sat cross-legged on the ground, sharpening machetes and cleaning their guns.

One day I arrived toward dusk, later than I ever had before, and it seemed everyone was gone. Had they already left to take up their positions at the barricade? The women too? For ten, twenty, thirty minutes I waited, just in case, but still no one appeared.

I approached Villa Bisset first, crouching behind the half-wall when I reached the terrace. The jalousies were closed and the louvers lowered, but gradually, a bit at a time, I worked at the louver with my fingernail, until there was just enough of a gap that I could see inside: a broad expanse of tiles, the canopy bed, the sunken tub, the settee. Everything was more or less as I had seen it last, a few months before. The only difference was the clutter: several bottles of rum, a straw hat, a machete, a pot and bowl. I had hoped to find something of Hector's—his book or one of his other few belongings, but there was no trace of him.

I was relieved to see the men had so far done the place no harm. And yet, it was impossible to look upon their belongings and not realize that they had already come to think of this as home.

How could they look upon this place and feel they belonged? Polished wood. Polished stone. The only coarse element was the men themselves. How could they not see that? How could they settle so easily in a place where they were not wanted?

All through the night, even as I slept, I could think of nothing other than the men in Madame's villas. They invaded my dreams as rudely as they had invaded my life, floating in and out of the rooms of the manor house while I, hopelessly anchored to the floor, could do nothing but thrash my arms, clawing at the air. As I tossed and turned in bed, the corner of the sheet wrapped around my neck like a noose.

F
or several days I did not venture from my rooms in the manor house. I could hardly bear to look out the window, afraid of the new horrors that might at any moment present themselves there. I spent most of these hours in bed, neither exactly asleep nor awake. If anything, it felt more like a fever state, brought on by a desperate desire to disappear from the material world.

During this time I must not have eaten, for Mona remained locked up in the kitchen. Outside there was a constant stench of smoke, a dense burn originating from something other than the tires and the cooking fires. Try as I might, I could not understand what it was. Even Cité Verd could not supply enough trash to fuel so steady a conflagration.

In one of my weaker moments, I decided it must be the smell of hell surfacing upon the earth.

In addition to the smoke, there were drums, a heady, endless thumping I could not block out, no matter how many shutters I closed, no matter where in the manor house I tried to hide. Even with a pillow over my head the beat burrowed its way into my chest and into my skull.

Not until dusk each evening did the drumming finally cease, and then only because it was time for them to put down their instruments and pick up their weapons.

I
n my moment of greatest despair, I wrote Madame another letter. This time I told her everything: about the corpse and the burning jeep; I told her about Dragon Guy and his followers and about Hector and Raoul's defection and about Mona locking herself up in the kitchen. I mentioned that the four closest villas remained unoccupied, and that I had found a place among the trees behind Villa Bacall where I could spy on the intruders, and it was as I caught myself nearing a description of the men's belongings in Villa Bisset that I stopped, understanding there were some things she could not know.

I burned the letter in the stove.

But even during the worst of it I was aware that I could not continue to absent myself forever from what was happening. Nearly six weeks had already passed. It was obvious they would never leave on their own.

A
bit each day, quietly with one of Raoul's machetes, I cut a path from the space in the trees behind Villa Bacall to the path leading to the forest preserve, a distance of perhaps twenty meters. Dressed in the clothes I had found in the old servants' quarters, I worked for a week, starting at dawn and stopping just before I knew the intruders were likely to appear, stumbling sleepily out of the villas. Had I not needed to remain silent and unseen, the work would have taken no more than a day.

It was to the path to the preserve that every path among the villas led. Reaching it gave me access to wherever I might wish to go, but I did not yet wish to go far. Instead I moved a little bit north and hid among the trees and underbrush near Villa Bernhardt, where I could watch men trudging back and forth from the preserve, bearing baskets of fruit they had just picked. It was there that I learned Villa Bernhardt had gotten its new roof after all, and I took comfort in thinking that Raoul was still taking care of at least some things. During a period of near constant discouragement, it was the one thing that allowed me to believe all might not be lost.

O
ne afternoon, after a long morning of cutting and clearing my new path, I settled down to take a break in my hiding spot among the trees.

In the courtyard of Villa Bacall, an old man with a flannel patch over one eye was chipping away with a hammer and chisel at a small cottonwood log. He worked contentedly, singing to himself a song I had never heard before.

The cannons fire,

We are not afraid of them.

Oh, Ogou, war!

I wondered if he had chosen the song on purpose, or whether it had simply come to him without his having considered the reason. The way he worked, never pausing to regard his progress, reminded me of so much else about this occupation. If there was one thing at which Dragon Guy and his followers excelled, it was being able to act without ever asking why. I could not help wondering if it was that very instinct that had kept them alive this long.

I could not say what it was that kept me there. Perhaps I was just exhausted. Maybe I was willing to be captivated by anything. Squatting in the brush for what I later realized must have been at least an hour, I ignored the pain spreading down my back and the stiffness swelling in my legs. The song went around and around.

Gunshots are fired,

We are not scared of them.

Only when the log was at last fully hollowed did the old man finally stop singing. Then he got up, his knees cracking like twigs, and sauntered into Villa Bernhardt. He came back a moment later with what looked like a goatskin, inelegantly hacked into a lopsided polygon. Curling his tongue in concentration, he stretched the skin across one end of the log, securing it with rope. He tested the drum with a few tentative hits.

The old man was in the process of adjusting the tautness when a second man sat down beside him, arranging several glass vases in a semicircle on the ground. Neither said a word to the other, though it seemed clear they were working in concert. Between his fingers the second man held mallets made of stick and fabric.

The old man settled down behind his drum. With the heels of his hands he beat out a rhythm. The man with the mallets joined in.

The others arrived from every direction, already dancing when they entered my view. How was it that they seemed to know just what to do? There was no hesitation, no discussion. Within just a few minutes, the patio around the pool, which had been almost entirely empty, was suddenly trampled in bodies. Never had I seen so many of them in one place. There must have been at least a hundred.

I marveled at how carefree they seemed, as if this were the most natural place in the world for them to be throwing a party. Their feet moved instinctively. They tossed their heads and bodies, swaying to the music. The ground shuddered beneath me. Soon they ran out of space on the patio and the dancing spread toward the trees, coming closer and closer. I waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hector, but he was not there.

Rising to my hands and knees, I inched backward out of the cavity. Not until I was sure no one could see me did I get to my feet.

The drumming and shouting chased me back to Villa Moreau, pushing me from behind. No doubt it would have followed me all the way up to the manor house. But just then a breeze blew through, carrying with it the smoke I had been inhaling for weeks—but stronger now than it had ever been before. It was earthy and heavy, and soon it filled the air.

With my head still swollen with the thumps of the drums, I turned around and headed back down the path I had cut to the forest preserve, following the corrosive smoke. It grew thicker and thicker, until I had to cover my mouth with my sleeve. I did not have to worry about anyone seeing me now.

As it turned out, I did not have far to go.

Just beyond the fork, in a clearing along the north trail, ran an enormous mound of earth perhaps ten meters long. And there was the smoke, escaping like steam from a poorly covered pot. As I drew closer, I felt the heat pressing against me like an outstretched hand, urging me to stop. After several more steps I could bear to go no farther.

Hell after all.

* * *

The next morning over breakfast I told Mona what I had seen.

“They're burning the trees,” I said. “They're turning the preserve into charcoal.”

“You're a fool,” she said. They were words that even a month before she would never have spoken to me. But it was undeniable that our circumstances had changed.

“If we knew what they were planning,” I said, “there might be something we could do.”

“If we knew,” Mona said, “we would be no better off than them.”

“I thought you wanted me to get rid of them?”

Mona shook her head. “It's too late for that now.”

“There has to be a way,” I said.

Mona pushed a forkful of rice through the last clumps of yolk on her plate. “Mark my words, the army will come. And when they do, I intend to say that I have been in my kitchen. I know nothing,” she said, “and that will be what saves me.”