by Brian Hodge
In all the time since, she had never truly known what Eel did. She willingly let herself be lied to — that he contracted to Nathan as a security specialist — though it was hardly out of ignorance on her part. Perhaps she suspected already, or clung to some fantasy and didn’t want to alter it for so insignificant a matter as the truth.
Fantasies were important under this roof. Certainly, Andrew Jackson Mullavey had infested the place with enough of his own.
“And supposing I were to leave him,” Evelyn said. “What would you do? Would you take me in? Because I do not intend to be alone, that’s a big part of the problem here, I’m living alone in my heart, but there’s a whole houseful downstairs that I can use to fool myself into believing otherwise most of the time. So you tell me right now, Terrance Fletcher, would you be the one to take me in?”
He smiled. Given her inflections, it was more a defiant challenge than an honest question. She already knew the answer.
“That,” he said, “could cause some severe problems.”
She huffed with wickedly smug satisfaction, crossed her arms over her breasts. “Just as I suspected.”
He turned onto his side again, eyes on her like blue ice, and would not let her escape them. “But I do think I probably would kill for you.”
Evelyn’s bitter smile faltered, crooked with uncertainty. “Am I to find that flattering?”
He’d not meant it as a threat, implied or otherwise, against Mullavey, nor did she seem to take it as such. Just another brush stroke of the mystique.
“I have to go,” Eel said. “Faconde’s probably wondering what happened to me.”
He sat up on the edge of the bed, fished on the floor for his underwear, slipped them over his feet and up along sinewy legs while feeling Evelyn’s hand resting on his back. Such a soft hand, going sharp, suddenly, when she curled her fingers and dug in with her nails.
“Why don’t you see if you can’t talk him into moving elsewhere for the duration of his stay. See if you can’t have better luck than Drew.”
Eel turned at the waist, looked at Evelyn with her hair fanned across the pillow, sheet now pulled demurely to her chin. “Not my job.”
“What is?” Spoken with an arched-eyebrow haughtiness that suggested she knew she’d get no straight answer. And that it didn’t matter. Then a slow, heavy-lidded smile. “You men and your secrets…”
He dressed quickly, while Evelyn slid from bed and threw on a filmy gown. She sat at her corner dressing table and brushed her hair into place. He paused while knotting his tie to watch her from behind. The soft gliding stroke of brush, her hand brisk and firm. What would daily life, such as his was, be like with her? He wondered in these moments of parting, questions born of the tragic afterglow.
Truthfully? It would probably be boring. In some relationships risk was a far more crucial element than love.
Evelyn saw him to the door, unlocked it. There was no goodbye, there were never goodbyes, merely an embrace that felt remarkably similar each time. Stiff without being awkward, her hands clutching his back just a bit tighter than his on hers. And a long meshing of famished gazes.
He was out the door then, and heading downstairs, for the guest wing. Generally careful to avoid being seen by any of the house staff as he emerged from the bedroom. Though surely some had guessed what was going on, and if they had, they kept quiet. Another thing he liked about Haitian peasantry.
He found Luissant Faconde in his room, sitting before the double doors that led onto a small wrought iron balcony, staring out the windows into the tree line. A gray day, no rain, colorless.
“From my villa in Monaco,” he said, his back to Eel, “I can sit and watch the sea. Those who come to the beach. The women. There is no beauty like that of the rich. Some will try to tell you otherwise, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Only the rich can afford to erase every imperfection.”
“Only the rich would care to try,” said Eel.
Faconde laughed in derision, spun his chair around. He looked like a deposed monarch, wedged into his chair as if it were a makeshift throne, vast belly bulging onto his thighs. “And only the poor could come up with such sour grapes as that.”
Eel smiled, thin and bloodless, strolled farther into the room. Did he carry Evelyn’s scent with him? “There are riches and then there’s wealth. And there is a distinction between the two. One’s far more valuable than the other. Can you guess which?”
Faconde frowned a moment. “Which do you possess?”
Eel raised his eyebrows, cool superiority. “Both.”
“And which would you fight harder to keep?”
“That’s a pointless question. I fought harder for the wealth. But it’s the kind I can never lose.”
“Only your soul,” Faconde said, and rumbled once again with soft laughter. “That’s why I remain perfectly content with my riches. Whether you lose money, or spend it … always more, always more.”
Eel nodded, placating rather than agreeing, and tweaked a finger to motion Faconde to get up. “Come on. Still got to get you to Nathan.”
Faconde nodded, grunted and puffed as he rose from the chair. He slung on a beige topcoat, its left sleeve rolled and pinned, like everything else Eel had seen him wear. He put on a matching hat and they were gone, riding in the back of Eel’s car, into the distant gray east.
“What is it that Nathan wants?” Faconde grumped. “I should know this much, at least.”
“Some problem with the Cayman transactions, on the back-half payments,” Eel said. The payment for the sabotage of Caribe Coffee Bags had been made on a half-in-advance, half-after-completion schedule. Funds routed from Switzerland to the Bahamas, from there to the Cayman Islands, from there into various Mullavey and Forrest bank accounts. Financial smoke screens and blind alleys at every turn, all the harder to trace.
“What?” Faconde was irritably distressed. “Those should have cleared days ago.”
“They didn’t. And Nathan would like this cleared up as soon as possible. Do we have an understanding?” He reached across the backseat, took the loose material of Faconde’s left sleeve, and rubbed it between his fingers. “Life is so much easier when promises are kept. It prevents so much ... ugliness?”
Luissant Faconde squirmed for a few moments, an activity Eel always found gratifying in those who held, or had held, positions of high power. Faconde was an old-line Duvalierist who had once presided over Haiti’s coffee trade. He’d had the ear of a dictator, who in turn owned his own secret police, the Tonton Macoute. Enemies could disappear in the snap of a finger.
And now? Faconde, under the palest of thumbs. Irony was an acquired taste Eel savored long and well.
He listened while Faconde nervously cleared his throat, then prattled on. Bemoaning the phlegmatic pace of the American judicial system. While the piecemeal devastation of Christophe Granvier’s life had gone beautifully, Faconde wanted more. The superiorities of American justice had been crammed down the throats of Haiti’s ruling class for so long, he had wanted to see it in action. To see Granvier dragged into court, his business in ruins behind him, and made to pay further for those he had killed. His coffee, therefore his responsibility, correct? Let the immigrant feel the wrath of his adopted country. There had been no telling Faconde, though, that it would take longer than he expected.
This to a man whose concept of national rule was midnight raids with machetes and Uzis. Western bureaucracy meets third world dictatorship, there were bound to be gaps in communication. Oh, of course Faconde planned to butcher the man in the end, but only after he had nothing left to forfeit but his life. And not before Granvier had run his full gauntlet of suffering.
While Luissant Faconde came well funded, he really was getting to be a pain in the ass. This business should be over.
Once at Charbonneau’s, Eel had his driver idle on Toulouse, then hit a remote that opened an adjacent garage-style door. Private parking inside, and deliveries were admitted here. The door e
ased down behind them while Lewis parked.
One door and a short hallway put them in the restaurant, out of the public eye. It was more rank back here, by the storage rooms and farthest reaches of the kitchen, with steam and sweat and odors that never reached the dining room.
Nathan Forrest met them just inside the kitchen entrance, scowled at Faconde, then laid a hand on Eel’s shoulder.
“I need to see you alone for a minute,” he said, and they left Faconde standing out of the path of waiters and waitresses. Nathan pulled Eel along a short corridor that ended in a private stairway leading up to the offices, and above that, his home. They stopped.
“I got a call from Brouchard about half an hour ago.” One of the cops on Nathan’s payroll. “A. J.’s ad man turned up this afternoon at NOPD headquarters. Never guess what he had.”
“The Caribe files.”
“That’s it.”
“What was his name? Gray, wasn’t it? Who’d he talk to?”
“Detective by the name of Crawford. That one fancies himself an untouchable, but he sent Gray packing, thought it was a load of horseshit. Which is just what it sounds like, you come in off the street like that, but all that does is delay the inevitable.”
“Right, if he talks long enough, he might find somebody who’d listen.” Eel flexed his fingers, feeling an itch that went all the way to his soul. Problems; solutions. Here he was at his best, and most eager. “Do you want me on this?”
Nathan shook his head. “I’ve got it taken care of for now.” A twinge of disappointment. Though it wasn’t as if his hands weren’t full already. “Does your brother know yet?”
“Hell no. Give him a coronary for sure, the way he was acting a couple days ago. If A. J. gets himself hit with one of those, I want to be there to see it. I keep telling him, he needs to work out, needs some damn thing to help him deal with stress, but does he listen to me? No, he just hires fuckups and dumps the results in my lap.” Nathan paused, reconsidering. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll go tell him myself who’s come to town.”
“About Faconde. Does this change anything?”
Nathan waved him off. Turned his back and started up the stairs, and stopped at the first landing. He looked down, in rolled shirtsleeves, vivid against a backdrop of old vermilion wallpaper. “Just see me before you go anywhere else.”
Eel collected Luissant Faconde in the kitchen, found him chatting up one of the waitresses. This guy, the urge never ceased. That she was clearly edging away didn’t seem to matter.
“Let her do her job,” Eel said.
“Yes, yes.” Faconde and his cherubic smile. He flipped a tiny wave to the woman. “Maybe we’ll see each other later? Yes?”
She smiled back, too sweet. “Maybe when you grow a new arm.”
Faconde’s abrupt rage was total, and nearly murderous. Voice rising to a bellow, he surged forward, arm lifting as if to strike, and he had the attention of everyone in the kitchen.
The waitress backpedaled, and several yards behind her, one of the cooks snatched up a heavy cleaver. No need for it to get that far, and Eel shot to Faconde’s side, steering him firmly away, and he could feel the tension vibrating through every pound of bulk. Eel held tight until he’d sped Faconde through the kitchen, to the hallway leading to the back storage rooms.
To look into his eyes was to see the pain of everything he had lost. Once, no one would have dared speak to him that way without fear of reprisal. Eel could almost feel sorry for him.
Finally, calm again. “She’s nothing,” Faconde sneered. “I’ll be in later, and I’ll sit out front and she’ll serve me, and I’ll show to her, she’s nothing.”
How the mighty had fallen.
“Nathan’s tied up right now,” Eel said, get this thing back on track. “He’s had some problems with a rice supplier, the rep’s up there now, he said it’ll be another half-hour, at least. Got some time to kill, he’d rather we stay down here.”
He let the moments tick by, let Faconde contemplate the idea of lingering in steam-soaked air, where spiteful eyes could look his way.
“You haven’t been down below yet, seen my humfo,” he then said. “You realize that?”
Faconde’s round face brightened with a wry grin. “Where the djab blanc works his magic.”
“Like to see it, since there’s time?”
“Why not.” Faconde pulled off his round glasses, inspected the steamy lenses with a frown, wiped them on his shirt. “If it gets me out of this air.”
Eel led the way into the storage room whose stairs descended to the basement. Through the first trapdoor, a tight fit for Faconde, then on to the subbasement, then deeper still, and every step was like another year peeling back to reveal the past.
He looked over his shoulder at Faconde and caught a grimace of distaste. Their footsteps were crisp wet echoes, and in the cavernous distance, drops of water fell to pools, subsumed, subterranean sweat. The brick and masonry were perpetually damp here, dull light from naked bulbs shining across the walls as if the passage along the river were a vast gullet.
Always the same down here, regardless of the world above. Sun and heat, or rain and chill, all were left behind, for down here resided a living perpetuity, as constant as absolute truth.
“These were French smugglers’ vaults,” Eel said. “Built in the early 1700s.” Then he laughed. “Did you know that when Nathan bought the restaurant fifteen years ago, it was primarily to have access to this place?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“A civil engineer he knows located these on some old building plans. Nobody even knew about them anymore, the trapdoors from the basements had been sealed up and forgotten. Nathan bought the place mainly for that reason. It was only later that Charbonneau’s got to be such a point of pride with him.”
Soft wind off the river, exhaled through mouths of brick and earth and rock, became a moaning undercurrent. The ambient voices of spirits in limbo, souls in torment.
“I suppose he was thinking, in a worst-case scenario, he could hide out here, if there was ever a need. Seems to be what the French pirates had in mind when they built the place. There’s even a brick oven, so somebody was thinking of the long term.”
Eel stopped in the broad arched doorway to the humfo, his sanctuary, Faconde at his shoulder. The tableau of a religion that had been in the making for thousands of years, touched by hands from both sides of the Atlantic, ancient African rites filtered through Roman Catholic ritual, tainted with French mysticism and its aristocracy’s penchant for poisoning. The candles, the bones, the talismans, the intricate vèvès traced on stone, the bottles and the shelves upon shelves of white pots, his gallery of souls. Eel lit the torches — he would allow no electric light to burn this far along — and beneath the vaulted ceiling, this chamber became a gothic shrine of paganism.
“Can you feel it?” Eel whispered.
Clearly, Luissant Faconde did. Something lived in the walls here, in the earth, back in the channel of the river. Something that hummed without sound, and throbbed underfoot, to be felt not in the skin, but in bone, and deeper still.
“I never … believed.” Faconde spoke in a reverent hush, a tone reserved for cathedrals. “In Port-au-Prince, to so many of us, it was the superstitions of peasants. Something to give them hope when superstition was all they had left. We were above it, we had no use for it.”
“Except,” said Eel, “as a fear tactic.”
“Haiti is full of those waiting to be afraid.”
It was as good a time as any. Eel slid back a step, and the garrote was out of his pocket and around Faconde’s neck before the man even realized he had moved. Thin wire, it sliced into Faconde’s larynx, then disappeared into the plump skin altogether.
Eel held tight, pressing in close to Faconde’s back while the man was overcome by frenetic struggles. With one arm gone, the other swinging wildly, he was off balance, and had never before seemed quite so handicapped. The vaulted ceiling reverberated with his choking rasp
and the shuffle of ragged footsteps. Eel could smell them: fear and betrayal, the essence of transcendence at hand, and as had happened so often before, he envied those bulging eyes their glimpse into the realm now opening. So many mysteries, solved in that moment of passage.
Did any of them ever thank him later, from the other side?
Feeble struggles, dwindling like final convulsions, and at last Luissant Faconde went limp in his arms. Eel held firm for a full two minutes, then let him sag to the stone floor, facedown, and peeled the garrote out of a raw trench cut into the neck. Eel sought the air above Faconde, around him, for any sign or fleeting shadow, any wisp of spirit or mist … but there was none.
Perhaps Luissant Faconde had lost his soul a long time ago.
Eel threw the stained garrote onto one of the altar tables; he would clean it later. He shut his eyes and gulped a few deep breaths, easy, better now, and didn’t move until his heart had slowed. He pulled the Maalox from his jacket pocket, took a couple of swallows to quell the fires, and could see straight again.
Rest, reflection. He needed to sit, take a few moments to absorb. Faconde’s back, broad and still, made a ready seat.
As Terrance Fletcher, he had grown up in and around Washington, D.C. Done several years of low- and midlevel political wet work, his ways and means as varied as the reasons for the targets’ choosing, and he never asked questions. There was always some shadowy governmental branch or individual needing a well-connected independent contractor with a limited need to know. Given his albinism, he was a freak even among anomalies, though it was something he was easily able to turn to his advantage. As cold and pale as his city’s monuments to dead statesmen, the fact that his countenance was never once connected with any of the DOAs he left behind enhanced his reputation immeasurably: Anybody that distinctive who remained invisible must be good. And led to the nickname he was handed, as in Slippery as an…
