The Boiling Season (34 page)

“War?” I said. “What is this war you keep talking about? Wars have strategies and purposes and aims. Wars have battles and campaigns. This is not a war. This is just shooting. This is nothing but mindless, brutal violence. This is a power struggle, nothing more. Your brother wants to topple President Duphay. Fine. But what does he propose to put in his place? How is all of this going to make anything better? Nothing is going to change. There's just going to be more death. Don't fool yourself,” I said. “You're too smart for this. You're just going to get all these people killed.”

My head suddenly felt like a bucket of stones. I had to close my eyes. I could no longer sit up straight.

“You might be right, monsieur.”

I felt my head lift and a pillow slide underneath.

“But it's still something,” Hector continued. “And it's more than you or any politician has ever done. What did you ever do to make things better?”

“I built this place,” I whispered through the crushing pain.

“What good did that ever do any of us?”

“If I had not built it,” I said, “you and your brother and everyone else would already be dead.”

“Goodnight, monsieur,” Hector said. “My brother is expecting me.”

H
ector had been gone just a few minutes when there was a knock on the door.

Claire limped over to my bedside table, setting down a supper tray.

“Thank you,” I said.

Closing the door behind her, she said, “I put a little extra in the bowl.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

W
hat was most surprising was how quickly life came to seem routine. Each day the children went to school at the casino. The older boys and the newest recruits drilled on the tennis courts. I kept up my walks along the grounds and took my meals in the dining room with the other men, never forgetting my bowl. Though I often saw Marc and Louis, I found other places to sit.

One evening after sunset I saw the skinny young man sitting with a young woman on a bench in the pavilion. Partially hidden behind a lattice woven with vine, he leaned in and kissed her. Was she Lulu the laundress? I wished I could hear their voices, whispering in each other's ears. I wondered what sorts of promises they were making. What could love feel like at a time like this? Perhaps they were imagining their future together. But what could that future possibly look like? Had they picked out the villa in which they would raise their family and tend their garden? Did they think this would last forever? They were so young—how could they understand these brief lives they were living were not their own?

There was only one person who I thought understood. Alone she sat each afternoon on the steps of the casino, tending to the children, as removed as it was possible to be from Dragon Guy's kingdom. It could not have been more clear that she did not belong with these people. And it occurred to me that no one, perhaps not even Mlle Trouvé herself, was aware that something else was possible, that there existed a world where she could be happy. Or at least it had existed, and could exist again. And only I could show it to her. Not Dragon Guy, not Black Max. No one but me.

Alone I often saw Mlle Trouvé walking the villa paths, always with a book in her hands. The only time she was not alone was during mass. I wondered how Dragon Guy had ever gotten her to come here. No words, no matter how grandiose, could have persuaded her to join such a futile cause. There could be no allure for her in such brutish men. I could imagine her, the beloved teacher, standing in a clean, pressed skirt at the front of a classroom, holding up a picture for her students, a forest of raised, eager hands. Had they kidnapped her—Dragon Guy and Black Max kicking in the schoolhouse door? No; she would have had plenty of opportunity to escape. The only reason could have been that she came for the children, knowing only she could protect them.

As she prayed each Sunday in the grass outside the pavilion, I thought I felt Mlle Trouvé asking for forgiveness—not for herself but for everyone else, for all of those too blind to realize what the future held. I could see, all around me, signs of that future approaching. In the corridor outside my rooms, the rugs were wearing low. All night long there was shouting in the room next door. Sometimes I was able to catch a few words, but rarely enough of them to derive any meaning.

Despite living in such close proximity, I had little idea who my neighbors were, aside from their ranks. I had seen some of their faces when we happened to pass one another on the way to or from the stairs, but I seldom saw them anywhere else. They did not dine with the other men. They did not socialize. Some of them went to the Sunday mass at the pavilion, but not all. Some of them I was quite sure I had never seen, although I occasionally heard their voices.

There was one in particular, sharper than the rest, who even through the wall conveyed more than a hint of menace. Whenever he spoke, everyone else instantly fell silent, no matter how animated the discussion had been just moments before. I eventually learned he was a colonel, and I did not need to be present in their private meetings to understand he was the one the others most feared. Perhaps even more than Dragon Guy.

I recall one night, not long after they had moved into the manor house, when the fighting was especially intense. A messenger came running to the colonel's office. Outside my door he paused, and I could hear him breathing heavily as he tried to collect himself. However well he succeeded, the moment the colonel's door opened, the boy lost his composure. “I told him, Colonel,” he blurted, still standing in the hall, where I could not help but overhear. “I gave him your orders, but he won't listen. He refused—” and there was a strangled sound as the boy was yanked inside.

The door closed like a thunderclap. The colonel's voice was calm but stern. There were others in the room with him. I heard them arguing, but each time anyone dared open his mouth, the colonel's voice returned them to silence. They seemed to know better than to contradict him.

With so little possibility of debate, the discussion did not last long. The door reopened, and the boy stepped out again into the hall. And then, for the first time, I heard the colonel's voice clearly, without a wall between us.

“Tell him,” he said softly, carefully, as if searching for just the right words. “If he disobeys me again, I will have his head.”

The boy tried to say something to indicate he understood, but the words got stuck and came out as little more than a gurgle. In his eagerness to get away, he stumbled. I heard his feet trip on the rug. No matter how clumsy he was, I wished just then that I could follow him, wherever he was going. I did not need to know whom they were discussing to share the boy's terror.

I often wondered if these men ever thought about me, troubled about the secrets I might overhear. At first I was careful to sit in the part of the room farthest from their voices; should they take it upon themselves to kick open the door, I wanted them to see my innocence. I kept my water glass full, lest they think I had been pressing it to the wall.

But soon it became all too clear that they considered my presence to be of no consequence. In me they saw not the slightest danger.

L
ate one afternoon, a few days after my encounter with Dragon Guy's guards, I was sitting on the balcony when I saw Hector down below, crossing the drive to the guesthouse. For the last several days I had not been able to stop thinking about our conversation. Since all of this had started, it had become easy to forget how young he was—that he was still just a boy. As hard as it was for everyone else to resist Dragon Guy, I could not imagine how difficult it would be for his own brother. But I knew Hector's better nature, and I knew I had to keep trying.

If Hector heard me calling out to him, he showed no sign. After a few more steps he disappeared inside the guesthouse. I waited for him, bent over the railing, but when a few minutes had passed and he still had not come back outside, I got up and went downstairs.

From the front steps, the guesthouse was quiet. The entire estate had been quiet all day. I knocked at the front door, but no one answered. What would I have said if they had?

The smell hit me the moment I turned the knob. Faint yet fetid, it seemed to seep from the wood. The open door released the rest, a queasying stench of decay that poked its wretched fingers up my nostrils. From down the hall came a rumble of coughing. A murmur of voices snaked from corner to corner. As I approached the drawing room, the coughing continued, growing louder and hoarser. I detected other sounds too—jumbled and indistinct, like the hum of a crowd heard from a distance. The corridor was lined with refuse: piles of filthy rags and empty baskets. Beside a broom made of palm fronds lay a mound of broken glass.

I saw the first man just as I was reaching the doorway to the drawing room. He was lying on a low table, his head wrapped in a rust-colored bandage. His eyes were closed. I came forward softly, trying not to wake him. Next to him lay another man. At first I could see him only from the neck up, dirty and unshaven but not visibly injured. As I turned the corner he rolled his head toward me, parting his bloodshot eyes.

The drawing room was the largest in the guesthouse, occupying a full quarter of the first floor. The northern wall was mostly glass, a series of broad, tall, arching windows, one after the next. The shades had been lowered, projecting a foggy yellow pallor across the otherwise darkened room, making it look like an old photograph. There were three rows of men, one each along the east and west walls, and one in between, cutting the room in half. All of the men were laid out on makeshift beds of varying lengths and heights, many constructed of a familiar glossy, black-lacquered wood. It was all here: Madame's piano and priceless antiques stripped into cots and gurneys.

Between most of the men there was room enough for a single person to stand. But there were also seven or eight men side by side on the dining room table, separated by only a few inches of bare mahogany. Nowhere on any of the beds was there a single sheet. Those had been turned into wrappings, which I saw now encircling arms and legs and feet and hands—or whatever it was that remained of them.

There must have been sixty or seventy beds, but that seemed too few. I had never seen so much blood, staining not just the men themselves but the beds and the floor and even the walls. A few heads turning to look at me led to a few more, until half the room was gazing at me with both curiosity and indifference, as if eager for distraction but sorry it came in no other form than me.

The last to notice me were the two women in dirty dresses and head scarves at the far end of the room, facing the windows as they examined one of their patients.

“What do you want?” one of them asked, glancing distractedly at me over her shoulder as she ground something in a mortar.

“Nothing.”

She had already turned back around, as if I had not spoken.

Throughout the rest of the guesthouse I found more of the same. Every room on the first floor was filled with beds and sick, wounded bodies: more men in the dining room and a ward of women in the library. In the kitchen several women with blackened fingers were grinding herbs and making poultices while a pot boiled over on the stove.

“Are you lost?” one of them asked.

“I'm looking for Hector.”

She dropped a rag in the boiling pot. “Haven't seen him.”

“Try out back,” said another.

The corridor off the kitchen led to the back patio, an otherwise short route made treacherous by the trash spilling underfoot. I had not been in the yard behind the guesthouse in some time—since long before Dragon Guy's arrival. Yet despite everything I had seen of late, I was still surprised to stand beside the empty pool and find not a single flower. The grass was mostly gone as well. Alone, barefoot in the dirt with a shovel at his side, an old man with a raw pink patch of skin covering the right side of his face peered down into the hole he was digging, as if trying to measure its depth. All around him, rectangular patches of dark soil showed where many more such holes had recently been filled. At the edge of the patio, a six-foot bundle lay wrapped in yet another stained sheet.

“The service is over.”

“I see.”

The old man stabbed his shovel into the earth. “There's still time to pay your respects.”

Seeing me standing there uncertainly, he came forward and took me by the arm. When we were just a few inches from the body, he lowered his head and closed his eyes.

I tried to tell myself that people did it all the time, praying for strangers. In a place like this, one did not always have the luxury of a face to identify the dead. And what did it matter, really? The dead all wanted the same thing.

I, too, closed my eyes and lowered my head. The smell made it impossible to forget what was at my feet.

In the self-imposed darkness an image began to draw itself in my mind. I did not want it there, and I fought it back, but it would not go away. So I opened my eyes, and for a moment everything was better. But when I closed my eyes again, the image returned. I could see nothing but Senator Marcus. His fine features, his carefully clipped mustache. But he was not dead. He was asleep in his bed, utterly at peace.

Very well, I said to myself, holding my breath, and I prayed. I prayed for the Senator's soul, and for the soul in the bag, and for Hector and Mlle Trouvé and Mona and Madame, and even for Dragon Guy and all the doomed souls he had brought here with him, and I hoped—despite the abundant signs to the contrary—that it might do someone some good.

S
itting on the balcony that evening, I was relieved to find the image of Senator Marcus gone. But I was left now with all those men wrapped in rags soaked in their own blood. I tried to put them out of my head, too. But I had nothing to replace them with. When I tried to think about how things had once been, I could see them only as they were now. There were no more gardens. After three months of their presence, there was not a single thing on the estate anymore that shone. Not even the lifetime supply of floor polish Paul had sold me could erase the traces of what had happened here. That blood would always remain.

And as dusk came on and—like every night—I watched Dragon Guy's men march up the drive to resume their endless battle, I felt a numbness come over me. How many would return in tatters and how many not at all? So futile did the entire exercise seem that I failed to see the point. I doubted if they knew themselves what awaited them outside the gate, no matter how many times they had gone out there. One could see the same blankness on a goat tethered to a stake, oblivious that the knife ground against the whetstone was intended for him. Nor was I sure anything would have changed if the men had known. It was a brutal fate, and this was a brutal place, but they were brutal themselves. Even the sad little men I had come to know at supper were brutal in their own sad little ways. Their lives were no more than this. What was the point in mourning them? Why bother trying to save them when they were too stupid to save themselves? These were the same people who had plagued me all my life. I had thought I had escaped them; maybe I had been a fool even to try.

If the fighting was more vicious that night than usual, I barely noticed. It was all the same to me whether there were ten guns firing or ten thousand. I laid my head down on my feather pillow, and I went to sleep. And I slept as I had not slept in years. Nothing—not a single sound—penetrated, and even my dreams left no impression.