The Boiling Season (38 page)

The schoolteacher continued to stare into the flames.

This was the closest I had ever stood to her, the clearest I had ever seen her face. For the first time I noticed the soft, faint, delicate hair outlining her cheeks and jaw.

“We have very little time left,” I said. “We're all in great danger.”

She gave me what I interpreted as a cautious nod, and I was about to go on, to say the other things I needed to say, when something happened for which I was wholly unprepared.

She smiled.

And not just any smile—it was beatific. It unfolded like a gift. Mlle Trouvé had surprisingly small, neat teeth, like a child. And the smile so warmed me that for a moment I managed to forget that it made no sense, that there was nothing in what I had said that should produce such happiness.

I could have watched her like this forever, letting the fire consume itself and the coals cool to ash and everyone in our midst evaporate along with the smoke. The world could produce only one such smile, and it was hers.

And my heart fell a little bit when her lips came together once again.

“I'm ready,” she said. “We have come so far. We are not afraid to die.”

It was dark and the trees wore bibs of smoke and the manor house was huge in the shadows. “It's okay,” I said. “I know you're not one of them. I'm not either. I'm like you. I'm on your side.”

Finally she turned to look at me squarely, and only then did I feel she truly saw who I was. I could see her considering what I had said, and I hoped she could find a way to trust me, that we could return again to that smile.

And then her mouth fell open again, and I saw the gloss of her tiny teeth.

That was the moment something hit me from behind.

My head whipped back and I stumbled forward, falling just a meter from the fire. When I got up again, my hands and knees were covered in ash.

“Forgive me, monsieur,” came a man's voice, laughing somewhere in the crowd.

I turned, trying to find him, and then I was struck again, and again I fell toward the flames.

A different voice this time, from a different direction. “Clumsy me.”

A foot came down on my back as I tried to get up.

The laughter spread, and I felt bodies closing in on me from all sides. Then I heard another voice—Mlle Trouvé's—yelling at everyone to get away. She grabbed my arm and pulled me up.

We met with little resistance as we pushed our way through the crowd.

“Going so soon, monsieur?” someone called after me. “Just when the fun was getting started.”

We did not stop until we reached the manor house pool. There Mlle Trouvé released my arm. “Go,” she said, giving me a push. “You have to go.”

“We must stick together,” I said. “That's our only hope. Please trust me.”

“Why can't you understand?” Anger was scrawled across her face. The flames leaped behind her, punctuating her words. “I do not wish to be saved.”

Chapter Thirty-One

A
ll along the road to the capital burned-out chassis mingled with garbage, and no one seemed to notice them. It was as if a car were just another useless nothing someone might indiscriminately let slip from his pocket.

Our progress was slow. The bus was constantly stopping to maneuver around another barricade of twisted furniture and melted tires.

I got off at the central market. The taxi drivers stirred without urgency as I approached their waiting cars. The man at the front of the line had a neck like a broomstick and an equally skinny mustache. Opening the back door to his car, I announced I was going to Lyonville. Before I could get in, a man dressed in khaki pants and dark sunglasses came forward, placing his hand on my shoulder.

“I'll take you,” he said.

I nodded toward the broomstick-necked man. “I'm perfectly content with him.”

“You'll come with me.”

It would have been wrong to say he was rough, but he was unequivocal as he led me—never letting go of my shoulder—to his car, farther down the line.

The new driver had a mustache too, but his sprouted heavy and wild. Even without being able to see his eyes, I knew it was me he was watching in the rearview mirror. The merengue on the radio was almost too low to hear.

At the very bottom of the road into Lyonville we encountered the first of the checkpoints. The two guards, both wearing army uniforms, sat in old wooden chairs in front of a gate adorned with fawning posters of President Duphay. Cradling their guns with a gentleness I doubted even their girlfriends knew, the soldiers came around the sides, and one of them flung open my door.

“Out,” he yawned. He smelled faintly of tamarind as he led me over to the garden wall at the side of the road, jamming the hollow opening of his gun barrel into the back of my head. I wished I could close my eyes, but I was afraid the things I might not see would be even more unsettling than the things I could.

The driver lit a cigarette as the other soldier climbed into the backseat of the car. “Did you see the end of the match?”

“I don't want to hear about it,” I heard a muffled voice say.

Chuckling, the soldier at my back clunked the heavy steel against my skull. I gritted my teeth and waited for the sting to pass. “He lost a bundle.”

“A goal like that,” the driver said, “I'd give both my legs to be able to make a ball do that.”

Crawling backward out of the car, the other soldier rose too quickly and the roof clipped the hat from his head. “You wouldn't be saying that if you lost money on it.” He picked the hat up from the dirt with a frown, smacking it several times against his thigh.

The driver dropped his cigarette, grinding it out with his shoe. “How about paying the toll so we can get on with it?”

I reached into my pocket and brought out my money. I was in too much of a hurry to argue. “How much?”

The man with the gun to my head slid the bills from between my fingers, taking every last one. “That should be enough.”

There was no point in objecting. The driver was already whistling himself into his seat.

Back on our way, we soon passed the road leading to my old neighborhood. I wondered what it looked like now, whether it too had been besieged. I was tempted to ask the driver to go back, if not to my father's shop then at least to the cemetery. I should not leave until I had a chance to say good-bye to my parents. I felt I owed them an explanation, perhaps even an apology. They needed to know this was simply a world that had no place for me. I had never belonged here, and now that Habitation Louvois was lost, I never would. I was sorry to have to leave them like this, knowing I would probably never come back, but it was the only thing left for me to do.

Even for that short detour, though, there was no time. I could no longer see the capital below. The air had grown cooler. We had already passed the road to Senator Marcus's old house.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” I asked after we had passed the third checkpoint and continued climbing.

“Of course.” The driver's voice betrayed offense at the suggestion that he might be lost. “You're going to Paul's house.”

He must have seen the surprise on my face.

“Everybody knows Paul,” he offered in explanation.

The car lunged forward. I was thrown back against the seat. The driver pitched back too, his arms stiff as branches.

Up we sped along the narrow street. Around a bend he swerved to dodge a pothole, and I hit the door with the full force of my body. Face pressed to the glass, I saw three girls in blue-checked school blouses standing at the curb, and my eyes were drawn to the white ankle socks so bright above their black leather shoes, and then to their faces. As I flew past, one of the girls—the tallest of the three—met my eyes, and I hung on to them as if they were the last living thing I would ever see.

The windows in the front were open and the wind stuffed itself into my mouth like a gag. The engine raced, and I could see a needle on the dashboard quivering in the red.

“What are you doing?” I finally managed to yell.

But the car was already slowing down.

We stopped in front of a low, whitewashed wall overhung with bougainvillea. Through the bars of the gate I saw a sprawling white house that looked like something from a magazine: airy and modern, with a terra-cotta roof and windows arranged asymmetrically in seemingly every available space. Between the trees flashed ribbons of blue sky. Somewhere beyond the endless patchwork of windows was a cliff overlooking the capital.

“Tell Paul that Céline says hello,” the driver shouted before squealing out of sight.

There was no bell, but I had been waiting only a moment when a man wearing a holster over his white polo shirt passed through the front door and the portico.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I have an appointment with Paul.”

He spun around wordlessly and began walking back up the drive. I saw him unclip a radio from his belt. There was a burst of static and then a voice at the other end. The conversation ended without a clear sign of what was going to happen. The man waited back under the portico, leaning against a pillar, thoughtfully turning the pages of a newspaper, as if his principal duty were to monitor the daily events of the world.

Finally the voice came over the radio again. An alarm sounded and the gate clicked open. The man put down his paper and nodded for me to follow.

In the marble foyer a muscular young man wearing a thin, violent smile and pink tank top stood waiting. “This way.”

An arched ceiling reached high above the lengthy hallway, edged with a delicate floral motif. We passed a vast polished ballroom and a brightly upholstered sitting room. A woman's touch was everywhere apparent.

At the end of the hall my escort slid open a set of glass doors, and he stepped aside to let me through.

It appeared at first glance that I was alone in the room. Directly in front of me another set of glass doors, flanked on each side by small lemon trees in fluted ceramic pots, looked out upon the garden and the pool. Beneath my feet a rich burgundy rug stretched out to the far ends of the room. At one end huddled a wing chair and a small teak table supporting a white porcelain lamp. The tassels at the other end of the rug pointed toward a massive mahogany desk.

Paul stood up to greet me. “Alexandre, I'm glad you made it.”

In the three years since I had seen him last, Paul had undergone yet another transformation. Whereas for me the arrival of our fifth decade had expanded the cavities around my eyes and rubbed the hair away in patches around the crown of my head, Paul had not only retained but improved the compact body of his youth, which seemed perfectly molded to his soft, neatly tailored suit. A tie was fastened tightly around his neck. Never before had I seen him wear one.

The room was cool despite the light bursting through the gauzy drapes.

“What happened?” Paul said as I came closer, wincing at the cuts and bruises on my face. “Another run-in with a waiter?”

“Yes,” I said. “With several.”

The man sitting in front of the desk glanced disinterestedly over his shoulder at me, remaining seated.

“Come.” Paul waved me toward him. “Come. There's someone I'd like you to meet. This is Charlie.” He gestured affectionately to the seated man. “He's my right-hand man. I'm nothing without him.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

Charlie nodded.

Paul put his hand on the man's shoulder. “Could you excuse us for a minute, Charlie?”

My escort was waiting for Charlie at the door, and when he stepped out into the hall, the doors closed behind him.

“I'm glad you came,” Paul said, as if genuinely surprised that I had. As if I really had a choice. “I've been worried about you.” He smiled. “We get so caught up in our work, we forget the little things that would bring us pleasure.”

Given the circumstances of my visit, I could only assume we had very different ideas about what constituted pleasure.

“Your house is beautiful.”

“That's kind of you to say.” Paul took a seat and motioned for me to do the same. “Of course, it's nothing compared to yours. I owe most of the credit to my wife.”

“I wondered if you'd gotten married.”

Paul scratched his head and gave me a quizzical smile. “In fact,” he said, “I sent you an invitation.”

“I—,” I began, but the air escaped my lungs as if from a punctured balloon. I could not allow myself to wither before I had even begun.

“I must not have received it,” I said. “You know how it is with the mail.”

Paul brushed away the disappointment. “It doesn't matter. I'd like you to meet her,” he said. “She's a beautiful girl.”

“Is she the one from the restaurant?”

“The restaurant?”

“I thought it might be the one I met—I don't know how many years ago.”

Paul laughed. “Oh, no no no. A lot has changed since then.”

Indeed, in that time he had evidently gone from petty criminal to king of Lyonville. Not quite as rapid an ascent as Hector's, but impressive nonetheless. All around me it seemed great men were suddenly attaining great heights. Meanwhile, I slid closer and closer to oblivion.

“How is your mother?”

“My mother?” Lifting a silver letter opener from his desk, Paul bounced the tip against his open palm, frowning at its dullness. “She passed away. Almost two years ago.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I hadn't heard. I can't remember the last time I was in the neighborhood. I lost touch with everyone.”

“I know how hard it is to get away. Even living this close. I try to go back when I can. We're building a school there. Or will be, soon. Charlie is from the neighborhood. Some of the other guys, too. They keep me connected.”

“Everyone back there must be very proud of you.”

Paul put the letter opener down. “You know how it is. Pride is easy,” he said with a shrug. “It costs almost nothing, especially compared to what it can get you in return.”

“Oh?” I had not expected so complicated an answer to so idle an observation.

Paul stood up and sauntered over to the French doors overlooking the garden. It looked as if he were preparing to deliver a lecture on some great philosophical truth. I felt myself growing weary even before he had begun.

“Consider your father,” Paul said. “He was honest and he had principles. He never did anything just for what it might get him. It took me a long time to understand how rare that is.”

Having been unprepared for the turn the conversation had taken, I suddenly found myself uncertain of what to say. No one could deny my father was a righteous man, but he was also miserable, and it is unfair to admire the one and ignore the other. It is the real world we must live in, not the world of our ideals.

Paul smiled warmly, still looking as though he were genuinely glad to see me. He took his seat again. “Do you know why I asked you here, Alexandre?”

Behind me I could hear the men outside in the hall. Charlie was waiting to be let back in. “I'm desperate,” I admitted. “I would have come even if you hadn't invited me.”

“It's a terrible mess,” Paul said, falling away from me as his chair tipped back. “Madness on all sides. It can't help but end badly.”

Suddenly my hand was shaking on the arm of the chair. I tried tightening my grip, but it still would not stop. “I need a visa,” I said. “And one for Hector, just in case. I've written to Mme Freeman, but there isn't time.” The calm I had so carefully been guarding was quickly slipping away.

Paul demonstrated his sympathy by lowering his eyes. “I'm sorry it's come to this.”

I tried to say that I was too, but nothing came out.

Paul said, “You've been like a father to him.”

A father? I had taken Hector in and tried to give him a better life, and then I had let him slip away. And now, eight months later, I was in danger of losing him for good. “If so,” I said, “I was as poor a father as I was a son.”

Paul folded his hands together on top of the desk. “It's not easy being a father.”

I thought to myself, must we do this? My sigh surely revealed my impatience, but Paul seemed not to notice.

“Do you have children?” I asked, as I knew I was supposed to. In fact, the possibility had not occurred to me until now.

Paul smiled with modest pride. “Two. A boy and a girl.”

I started to congratulate him, but then I stopped myself, fearing he would feel obliged to lecture me further on the topic of fatherhood.

“I have no doubt that you're an excellent father,” I said, hoping we could leave it at that.

Paul spent a moment staring at his open palms. “It's kind of you to say, but it wasn't me I was thinking of.” And then I realized his gaze had shifted. He was looking at me with an unusual intensity. “I was thinking of our fathers, yours and mine. I've been thinking about them a lot lately.”