Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (9 page)

           
Again the stranger laughed. “What
gratitude!”

           
Kwan felt himself blush. “I beg your
pardon! I was so confused, it was so fast— Of
course
I’m grateful! You saved my life!”

           
“Use it well,” the stranger said.

           
They took the ferry over to the
island
of
Lamma
, its small houses gleaming in the sun.
Along the way, they got out of the
Toyota
to stand at the rail and breathe the cool
sea air and look at the world sparkling all around them.

           
“You’ll have to leave
Hong Kong
,” the stranger said. “Your reasons for
staying here are no good any more.”

           
“I don’t know where to go,” Kwan
said. He seemed to have given over all control, all capacity for planning, to
this man who had saved his life. “I don’t know how”

           
“By ship, I think.” The stranger
gestured out over the water; a big passenger liner like an oval wedding cake,
with an American flag for decoration at the stern, was just pulling out of
Hong Kong
Harbor
. “Those ships have many Orientals in their
crews. Especially in the kitchens.” He smiled at Kwan. “You’d make a fine
dishwasher, with that education of yours.” “I don’t have any papers.”

           
“Maybe someone you know,” the
stranger suggested,
^cc
would know someone who works for one of the
shipping lines.”

           
“The family I’m staying with, they
might.”

           
“I wouldn’t be surprised. You could
ask.” The stranger nodded again at the departing liner. “A ship like that,” he
said, “goes everywhere. In six months, it goes all around the world. Through
Suez
, through the Med. You could get off in
Genoa
or
Barcelona
. Or even all the way to
Florida
.”

           
Kwan looked at the ship. “
America
,” he said.

           
X really don’t like to do it in such
a fashion, so sloppily, leaving these anomalies around, these quasi-miracles,
like loose ends in a popular novel. Locked doors that open, alarms that do not
sound.

           
It’s the haste that causes it, of
course, His desire to get this mess cleaned up once and for all. So I suppose
it doesn’t matter in the long run if I make a bit more of a mess along the way.
It does offend the perfectionist in me, though, I must admit that.

           
And I do have to be careful that
none of my principal performers notice these aberrations from the laws of
physics. Fortunately, this is a skeptical age; belief in miracles is not
widespread. There have been times and places in human history when I would
never have gotten away with these slapdash methods, but they are long gone.
Today’s humans would much rather believe they are being tricked; alternatively,
^cc
there must be an explanation,” which they simply have not yet
quite worked out.

           
Still, I can’t help feeling rueful.
Oh, if only I had been called on in an age worthy of my talents. On the other
hand, I do increasingly see why He has had enough.

           
In Sao Sebastiao they talked with
the sort of priest who believed that life on Earth was in any case irrelevant,
that pain and suffering could only ensure greater joy and harmony in the next
world, and that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly would be punished with
horrible fire in the hereafter. He was not, as he told them proudly, an
activist priest.

           
How, Maria Elena wondered, could
such a man be any use at all to her employer, a doctor from WHO, the World
Health Organization, a man who believed that life on Earth was all we have,
that pain and suffering must be alleviated whenever and wherever possible, and
that rich men who treat God’s creatures badly should be wrenched out of society
like diseased rootstock from a vineyard? But in Sao Sebastiao there was no one
else; the Administration Section doctor visited the village less than once a
month and his records were useless, as they already knew. Only Father Tomaz had
the statistics, the births and deaths, the illnesses, the deformities, all the
spoor of the chemical assassin.

           
Maria Elena translated as best she
could, as unemotionally as she could. Beside her, Jack—Dr. John Auston, of
Stockbridge,

           
Massachusetts
,
U.S.A.
—ploddingly asked his questions, filling in
the spaces on the forms, writing his comments in his tiny illegible
hieroglyphics in deep black ink. Maria Elena—Maria Elena Rodriguez, of Alta
Campa, Brazil, later of Rio, most recendy of Brasilia—translated Jack’s dry
questions into rough- toned Portuguese, translated the priest’s indifferent and
querulous answers, and kept her own personality firmly out of the equation.

           
Even her voice. A rich contralto,
she kept it muted and flat, with none of the full-throated power that used to
resound through the great music halls of
Sao Paulo
and Bio, when the crowds would rise to
their feet, weeping and applauding, roaring the choruses with her, she striding
back and forth on the stage, loving them, loving herself.

           
She never strode any more. Never
sang.

           
The three sat in the shade of a
large tree beside the squat, blunt adobe church, on folding chairs brought out
from its dark interior, in which two old women in black, not together,
whispered their prayers, their J’S enlacing in the air like the ghosts of
snakes. Some distance away, in a brown field, their pilot sat in the shade of
his plane reading fumetti, comic books that use staged photos instead of
drawings. Behind them, the village baked in the sun, most of the residents away
at work in the factory out of sight beyond the brown hills, the children away
at their classes in the factory school: one of the benefits the factory had
brought, to make up for the death and horror it had also brought.

           
Father Tomaz’s bland recital of
children born dead, children bom without arms, without eyes, without brains,
poured through the transitional vessel of Maria Elena, unsullied by any trace
of passion. Maria Elena’s mind was full of her own two dead children, but
nothing of them, nothing of herself, touched her words, neither to the priest
nor to the doctor.

           
What would Father Tomaz say if she
were to tell him about her failed children, about Paco’s leaving her, about her
agreement with Paco’s conviction that she was now foul—befouled? That Paco had
died before their argument was resolved? He would say, “God is testing you, my
child. He works in mysterious ways. We cannot understand Him, we can only bow
to His will, secure in the knowledge that our suffering is recorded in Heaven,
and that our reward is in Heaven as well, with our God, and our Savior, and His
angels and saints, in eternal joy. Amen”

           
Jack’s forms eventually were all
filled in, Father Tomaz’s recital of the plague years was finished, and the
three stood from the folding chairs to stretch. They carried the chairs back
into the church—the sibilant old women continued, unending, unquenchable—and
when they were back outside, in the sun, Father Tomaz said to Maria Elena,
“Would you tell him, we don’t need medicine. What we need is faith in God.”

           
“No,” Maria Elena said. “I won’t
tell him that.” And she allowed at last the hatred to show in her eyes.

           
The priest, offended, stepped back a
pace, glaring at her. Jack said, “What was that about?”

           
“Nothing,” she said.

           
Today’s pilot was new, a skinny
brown man with a bandit moustache. He got to his feet as he saw them coming
across the field from the church, and grinned beneath that moustache. He’d
probably been bored, even with his comics, which he now tossed up into the
plane onto the seat beside his own.

           
As they walked, Jack took Maria
Elena’s elbow, ostensibly because the dry cracked field was uneven, bumpy, a
litde awkward to walk on, but really, she knew, just to touch her. They’d been
working together now for four months, and after the first month he’d begun to
pursue her with a kind of lighthearted determination, not as though he didn’t
really care, but as though his caring had to be kept swathed in protective
padding. This caution, or self-protection, or whatever it was, made it easier
for Maria Elena to fend him off, without ever having to explain that it wasn’t
him but herself she was rejecting. In the last few weeks his pursuit had become
more reflexive, absent-minded, ritualistic; they’d setded into a vaguely
flirtatious but essentially comfortable relationship that could last for as
long as they worked together.

           
He was a decent man, John Auston,
thirty-seven years old, tall and awkwardly husky, as though his skeleton had
never been properly hooked together but still jangled and skidded within its
padding of flesh. He was methodical, quiet, devoted to his work for WHO, and if
Maria Elena were in the market for a man, here was one, an excellent one. But
she was not in the market, never would be in the market, and in any event Jack
was not really unencumbered.

           
The fact was, Jack was married and
divorced. He had an ex-wife far away up in the
United States
, and though he would never admit it, Maria
Elena could tell that he still loved her. Or still needed her, which came to
the same thing.

           
Jack always avoided talking about
that ex-wife of his who, when their daughter was three, had packed up one day
and taken the child and crossed the entire United States from Stockbridge,
Massachusetts, to Oregon, simply to get away from him. Maria Elena had no sense
of the woman, whether she was a good or a bad person, strong or weak or
anything about her, and yet sometimes she felt she understood why that wife had
left. There had come a point, there must have come a point, when she had simply
grown tired of
steering
him. He was
so easily steered, as she herself had steered his flirtatiousness into this
unthreatening shoal where it now safely stagnated, and yet how could you feel
anything but tarnished if you devoted your life to treating another human being
as though he were nothing but a docile ox?

           
Since the second front seat, next to
the pilot, was so much more desirable than any of the four seats behind it,
Jack and Maria Elena had worked it out that one of them would ride up front on
the way out each day and the other on the way back. Today, Jack had chosen the
first half of the trip, so now he was the one who climbed up the two toeholds
and crawled over the pilot’s forward-folded seat into the back. Then the pilot
unfolded his seat into normal position and helped Maria Elena climb up. She
slid across to the passenger side, stowing the pilot’s fumetti in the pocket
beneath the window beside her.

           
The pilot took his position at the
wheel and, after a brisk series of preparations, started the single engine,
turned the small plane around in a bumpy circle, walked it halfway back up the
field, and swept it around again to face the light wind. Over by the church,
under the tree, Father Tomaz watched; probably hoping they were on their way to
God instead of
Brasilia
. The pilot started them forward and they jounced and hopped down the
field, the wings waggling as though they’d fall off, the small wheel in the
pilot’s hands shaking like a ribbon tied to a high-speed fan, until all at once
the wheels lifted clear of the hard ground and the plane became graceful,
coherent, almost alive.

           
There was no door on Maria Elena’s
side, which was why she and Jack had had to climb over the pilot’s seat, but
the window had a flap in the lower half, like a
deux-chevaux
that she could open with her elbow to look down
direcdy at the receding ground, becoming aware for the first time just how
large the graveyard was on the other side of the church. And how small so many
of the graves. It was human instinct, when something was trying to exterminate
the species, to reproduce faster and faster. Particularly when the killer was
mostly killing children.

           
The noise inside the plane was at a
level where conversation was possible but not easy, so usually they didn’t talk
much, particularly on the flight back, after the long dry interview in two
languages. Today, though, after about five minutes, the new pilot frowned at
her and said, “Why do I know you from someplace?”

           
This still happened sometimes.
People still remembered
Maria Elena
,
the pop star, the rising talent who had shone so brightly and so briefly and
then disappeared. She had used only her first names,
Maria Elena,
and the people had cried them out at the
concerts—“Maria Elena! Maria Elena!”—as though she were a soccer star.

           
Ah, but that was then. When someone
remembered now, or thought they did, she denied it. What was the point in
rehashing that painful history? They would want to know why, with her fame
still growing, with her record albums topping the charts, with her career on
the brink of the international—she had even recorded one album in Spanish—she
had so abruptly disappeared.

           
And how could she talk about such
things? That her body was foul, her children dead, her husband recoiling from her
in disgust. That she could no longer sing, that the music was no longer in her.
And that when she had tried to use her celebrity for something that really
mattered, to protest the destruction of the land and the people on it, the
media had closed against her, shutting her out, more interested in jobs than
health, caring more about their wallets than their children.

           
So when this new pilot asked why he
knew her, she offered him a small and distancing smile, as though he were
merely flirting, and said, “I can’t think of any reason,” and turned away to
look out her window at the ground bumping by far below.

           
That stopped the conversation, but
only for a few minutes. Then, when she incautiously looked again in his
direction he grinned at her under his bandit moustache and said, “Not such a
good priest down there, huh?”

           
Maria Elena looked at him in
surprise. “You could tell that from way over by the plane?”

           
“I could tell
that
from the sky,” he said, and laughed.

           
“He thinks God wants all this
misery,” she said. “Why should God want it?”

           
“Who benefits?” said the pilot,
raising one brown stubby finger in a parody of the pedantic teacher. “That is
always the question to ask, when you want to know what is really going on. Who
benefits from the docility of the people? Does God?”

           
“The owners of the factory,” Maria
Elena said.

           
“Not God?” It was as though he was
teasing her.

           
Jack, in the isolation of the seat
behind them and not understanding Portuguese, couldn’t take part in the
conversation. It was up to Maria Elena by herself. Earnesdy, she said, “God
made us. He loves us. He doesn’t want us to be tortured. It doesn’t benefit Him
if the people don’t fight back when the factory kills their children. It
benefits the owners.”

           
‘The owners.” He seemed doubtful.
“Who do you mean, exacdy?”

           
“We all know them,” she said, with
contempt. “They live in
Rio
, with
their ocean views, they come to
Brasilia
surrounded by lawyers to testify that the
factories are cleaner than last year. Always cleaner, cleaner. We show the true
statistics, their lawyers make the statistics lie.”