Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  I have been classified as an escape risk, among other things. It doesn’t take them long to classify you. They read your file, look you over, ask your age, race and religion, and then write down whatever Representation of Female Evil they figure you most closely represent.

  a) Cold Calculators: Women who ruthlessly kill their husband(s) or loved one(s) for financial gain.

  b) Black Widows: Serial murderers of husbands, male lovers and next of kin. Some killings seemingly have no motive. Most common modus operandi is poisoning.

  c) Depraved Partners: Highly charged, (hetero)-sexual, violence-loving young women who link up with an evil, murderous male partner to commit serial murders, often involving the kidnapping and torture of young white women.

  d) Explosive Avengers: Manlike or lesbian women. Premeditation is far from clear.

  e) Robber Predators: Women who murder while committing or covering up financial-gain felonies.

  My classification officer got excited when I asked her to read again the definition of an Explosive Avenger. When she reread it, watching my face this time, I asked for clarification on “Premeditation is far from clear.” She said “premeditation” meant you had planned your crime in advance; it wasn’t just something you did because you lost control of your reason in a moment of passion. I said I understood what the word meant, but I didn’t understand the meaning of “Premeditation is far from clear.” Did that mean it was unclear whether the crime was premeditated, or that the premeditation itself was not very well thought out? My CO looked at the words, frowned, then admitted it must be a mistake, that the line ought to read “Motivation is far from clear.”

  I went back to my house, feeling I had made one small step for Female Evil. However, nothing changed. My CO wrote that I probably had a “lesbian-type affiliation” with Consuelo de Corazón, which is why I maintained the illusion I was being held hostage. In her opinion, I had clearly murdered my child, “though premeditation is far from clear.”

  Rainy says that if it is any consolation, she too has been classified as an Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator, even though she never made one dime from killing her twins.

  Everyone here gets classified as a Something-American.

  Rainy. Age: 32; Mexican-American; Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator.

  Frenchy. Age: 35; African-American; Robber-Predator.

  Yours Truly. Age: 47; Canadian-American; Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator.

  I appealed my classification, saying I did not have U.S. citizenship, but the classification officers who reviewed my case could not conceive of a nationality that wasn’t at least half American. “Everybody’s got to have some good in them,” they said.

  Once you have been classified, that’s what you have become. And you go to your grave here with your classification papers stuffed in your hand like a diploma.

  My husband (more about him later) hired a lawyer to represent me—Ferdinand Pile, Jr.—the self-acclaimed “Cadillac of lawyers.” As soon as I heard his name, I figured Vernal must have a million-dollar insurance policy on my life.

  Even though I don’t think Pile, Jr.—who promised he’d get me out of prison if it took him the rest of his life—had ever defended a murder case, I’m not blaming him for the fact I got the death sentence. I want it to go on record that I take full responsibility for what I did. That’s one reason I’m writing this book.

  It’s so easy to get sidetracked in here. To lose my train. Alone in my house I open The Rituals of Human Sacrifice, and turn to a section of photographs. A child’s shoe in the grass—this one makes me saddest. I think how much of a story that shoe, with the mindless persistence of objects, has to tell. I imagine slipping my baby’s narrow foot into it, tickling his sole when he curls up his toes, the way he always did.

  I fed my child; I did what I could. But even in my dreams he is always hungry, and no matter how much I feed him, it’s never enough. He sucks his thumb and pulls out his eyelashes with his fingers. Sometimes he dips the eye-lashes into honey, or something else sweet, like treacle or molasses, then plays with them between his teeth. I honestly think he swallows them, though by that point the dream is usually over.

  I can only guess what he might have become. Sorrow is nourishment forever.

  chapter two

  In books, people meet on tropical islands or in high-class restaurants or when they’re both doing something dangerous in a foreign country and are thrown together because they narrowly escape stepping on the same land mine; I met Vernal in a public washroom. Both of us were so embarrassed that we never could remember afterwards which one of us had been in the wrong place. We both remember apologizing, each one tripping over the other, as we Canadians do, to apologize first.

  It was April 1985. I’d just turned thirty, and I’d been flown to New York to attend the launch of a book I’d translated from Spanish into English. I had majored in languages, and had a job freelancing for a publishing house with offices in Vancouver (where I lived), New York and Bogotá.

  My assignment had been to translate the memoirs of a woman who was connected, by marriage, to one of the major Colombian drug cartels. Carmen María de Corazón had been kidnapped by a narco-terrorist guerrilla group called Las Blancas (The White Ladies), who had taken to abducting wealthy foreigners and nationals alike, using ransom monies to finance their drug-smuggling operations and the recruiting and training of young guerrilleras. Carmen had been released once a ransom of six million dollars had been paid by “undisclosed sources.” Kidnapping had become so prevalent in Colombia that a new law had been passed: when a national was abducted, his or her bank account was automatically frozen, to prevent ransom payments being withdrawn.

  Carmen’s orange-haired bodyguard, who introduced herself only as Bret, met me at JFK. It was my first time in New York, and I was there because Carmen had insisted—all expenses paid. On the way into town, Bret gave me an envelope full of cash, including a hundred-dollar bill “for the mugger.” She advised me, too, not to walk through Central Park “with that pack.” The Canadian flag, with its bull’s-eye maple leaf, was an open invitation.

  When the cab let us out at the Ritz (“Carmen María wants you to feel at home”), Bret pointed me to one of the overstuffed chairs in the lobby while she checked me in. There was a problem with the room, in that they didn’t have one, but I was quietly upgraded to the honeymoon suite, and given a complimentary bowl of fruit and a bottle of chilled champagne—just the sort of treatment I would have expected at the Ritz.

  As we went up in the elevator, I told Bret the Ritz had always been part of our family mythology. Every summer, from the time I was ten years old, we’d spent two weeks “getting away from it all” in the Kootenays. I resented the leech-infested lake, the pack rat that stole my mood ring, the outhouse with its “If You Sprinkle When You Tinkle, Be a Sweetie and Wipe the Seatie” sign and the fact that there were no boys within fifty miles, boys being the “it” from which my parents were intent on getting me away. I’d be picking the scabs off my mosquito bites and the mouse droppings out of the butter, and complaining that I couldn’t just go to bed and sleep for two weeks because my mattress had no springs in it, when my father would say, “What do you think this is, the Ritz?”

  Bret looked at me as if I came from Canada, and when we got to my suite, asked if I liked Chinese. I said yes, assuming she meant food (I had been warned not to take anything at face value in the Big Apple), and she rolled her eyes again and said she’d be back to pick me up at five-thirty.

  My suite took up two floors: there were three television screens, a computer and a fax machine, and a king-size bed with a mirror on the ceiling that made me feel a pang for the crab fisherman from Prince Rupert I’d been seeing in the off-season. I had a seashell-shaped bathtub made of green marble, with gold faucets, and a toilet that flushed soundlessly. The glass cases, antique, were filled with clay figurines. I examined these closely before getting undressed and wondered if anyone else had noticed that the rain g
od had a double-headed penis, or that the child lying on his back holding up his heart to the rain god had a hollow place in his chest, a bowl to catch his tears.

  I tried to nap, but then gave up, got dressed again in my jeans and T-shirt and duffel coat with two toggles missing, and went for a walk—without my pack. Halfway across the park I got tired and sat to rest on the only empty bench I could find, one with a used tampon and a dead rat lying beneath it. I returned to the hotel, took a long bath and dressed for the third time that day in the same clothes I’d been wearing since I’d picked them out of the dirty laundry before leaving Vancouver. It was either that or go to the launch in my pyjamas. I’d forgotten to pack anything fancy.

  When Bret, who had even changed her hair colour for the evening (to match her boa constrictor pantsuit), arrived, we took a death-defying cab ride through the potholes of New York to Philippe’s Chopsticks Restaurant. “Don’t order the Strange Taste Chicken,” Bret advised when a tiny waitperson brought us a menu thicker than Carmen María’s book, Rescate (Ransom). “It doesn’t taste like any bird you’ll ever eat.” Bret was an expert on everything from Chinese beer to firm-textured tofu; she knew the caloric content of every dish I considered ordering, and when I couldn’t make up my mind, she told me the only thing you could be sure had no calories was sex. One teaspoon of spermatozoa contained thirty-two different substances, including vitamin C, vitamin B12, fructose, sulphur, zinc, copper, magnesium, potassium, calcium and many anti-free radicals, she explained. She figured she could even give up eating if she could find a man to have oral sex with once a day. “But not for the sex, just for the health part. I stopped going to bed—with men—centuries ago. All they were ever interested in was, you know, spreading their gene pool around.”

  I drank three Tsing-Tao’s in a row and left most of my WorWonton untouched. I didn’t say this to Bret, but I wished I could meet one man who wanted to procreate. There’d been men in my life—but either they already had children and didn’t want the prospect of more child support, or they were too young and didn’t want the commitment, or they were away from home with their work too often, or they worked at home and didn’t want to share the playroom. I’d always wanted babies, and the life that went with them, everything from the environmentally friendly diaper service to the folding stroller. Well, at least one baby. Someone to love, who would love me back, forever.

  That kind of forever didn’t seem to be in the offing. Even my fortune cookie advised, “Romance is iffy.” Bret snorted when I showed it to her, and said Margaret Trudeau was the only person she’d ever heard of who got lucky in New York, “if you can call giving Jack Nicholson head in the back seat of a stretch getting lucky.”

  After she’d paid the bill and flagged down another cab, we endured a second near-death experience all the way to The Purple Reign; Carmen María’s husband had shares in the fashionable nightclub, now owned by “the Asians.” After briefing the doorman to ensure I would have no problems getting in (they had a no-jeans policy, she explained), Bret said she was abandoning me because she had a coming-out party to attend; a friend of hers had just done nine months, and they were going out celebrating. Bret kissed me on both cheeks and said she regretted not having the chance to get to know me better. In retrospect, I felt I had barely escaped from an iffy situation: when she embraced me, it felt like being hugged by a knife drawer.

  Inside the club I climbed the purple-and-gold-carpeted steps to a landing where a woman barely dressed in a gold lamé gown informed me I would have to check my handguns at the door. I checked my duffel coat instead, glancing around the room trying not to appear as nervous as I felt, and when I saw no familiar faces, helped myself to a tray of soggy canapés. A man in a white suit introduced himself, saying he was looking forward to hearing me recite from … his voice trailed off, and I filled in the name of the book for him … which would be in half an hour or so, after a few drinks.

  A Cuban waiter tried to tempt me with one of his mini sausage rolls as I sipped a cautious new wine from the Niagara region, which, I was sure, Carmen had had imported especially for me. The Chinese beer I’d had earlier, and the canapé mixed with the wine, started, suddenly, to have an unexpected effect, and I asked a man in a mauve tux, who looked like he ought to know, where the ladies’ was. I pushed open the heavy doors he pointed me to and had ensconced myself in the cubicle furthest from the door (the toilet that has the least germs, according to an article I read; the one in the middle has the most, and it was occupied), thinking I would stay there until I threw up or it was time to give my reading, when I heard the person in the middle stall clearing his throat. Then, with the hint of a question in his voice, he spoke my name.

  I got to my feet, flushed the toilet, even though it wasn’t necessary, and pushed open the door, certain now I was in the wrong washroom. He came out of his stall and that’s when we both began apologizing. With his wind-blown blond hair and blue eyes that looked as if they were more suited to picking rocks on the beach than picking weenies off toothpicks, he looked attractively out of place, not just in this washroom but in the clothes he wore too: he was the only person—besides me—who had not dressed formally. He met my gaze, smiled as if he had been caught, then looked away. The scar on his cheek, just below his right eye, made him look dangerous.

  Our hands touched as we both reached for the brass door handle. Once we were on neutral ground, I asked him how he’d known it was me in that cubicle next to him.

  “Only someone from Vancouver would wear hiking boots to a nightclub in New York,” he said, smiling. He pointed: his own boots were the same make as mine.

  Back in the crowded room, Carmen brought us each a glass of champagne and kissed Vernal on the cheek. “I wondered who’d kidnapped you,” she said. She looked exotic—her red hair, sullen, scarlet lips and black-painted fingernails embedded with emeralds like cut stars. Her eyes were the light green of a parrot’s wings, and her body smelled faintly of nutmeg.

  Carmen and I had spent hours together on the telephone when I was translating her book. At first I didn’t know why I had been asked to take on the work—New York must have been full of Spanish-into-English translators—but I soon learned that nobody south of the border would even look at the manuscript for fear of reprisals, of being kidnapped themselves or having their families threatened. I’d learned a lot more from Carmen María than just the Spanish colloquialisms for bribe and assassin.

  “Vernal is canadiense, mijita, just like you!” Carmen exclaimed. “He lawyer.” She pronounced lawyer “liar,” and when I looked at Vernal he pushed his hair out of his face and gave me a what-can-I-say kind of smile. Carmen told him to bring us some more drinks.

  I ran my thumb over my own chewed fingernails as Carmen dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin covered with small blue fleurs-de-lys, her way of showing off the emerald ring, worth ten times what I’d been paid for translating her book. I raised my eyebrows, and she waved her hand dismissively.

  “A gift from my husband. He is in prison again today, or else he would be here with us, celebrating. What can I tell you? At least he remembered my birthday.”

  When Vernal came back with our drinks, Carmen turned to speak to a group of women dressed as if they were going on a safari to Tiffany’s. Vernal had a copy of Rescate but couldn’t decide whether it was the right thing to do, to ask the translator to autograph it; he kept flipping through the book instead, the way people do when they haven’t read it yet and don’t know what to say.

  “I look forward to reading it … very much,” he said finally. He looked down at the floor, and it seemed to me he blushed. “That goes without saying, I suppose—I mean, that I look forward to reading it. What else are you supposed to do with a book?”

  “You could put it on your head,” I said, trying to make him feel at ease. “It’s an exercise they used to make us do … at charm school. Walk across the room with a book on your head, to improve your posture. I grew up thinking books were instruments of t
orture.”

  He was still looking at his feet. “Writing must be torture for you then. Is it?”

  “Translating is very different from writing,” I said. Vernal downed his second glass of champagne rather too quickly. I straightened my shoulders. “Do you read … many books?” I asked.

  He stared into his empty glass, turning it round in his hand. “I hate to confess, but only what puts me to sleep. Which means I like very dull books. Burke on the Law of Recision in Contracts, for example. I don’t think I’ve ever got to the end of the first paragraph.”

  I laughed, trying to sound impressed.

  “I hope Carmen María’s book doesn’t put you to sleep that quickly,” I said.

  “It won’t. Of course it won’t. Not if the cover is anything to go by. And I’m sure you … your translation will keep me awake. If nothing else does.”

  After an awkward pause, where we tried not to make eye contact, I asked Vernal how he knew Carmen. “I know her husband,” Vernal said. “He’s been to Vancouver … on several occasions. In the past.” He dropped his voice as he looked around the room. “He’s a client of mine.”

  “And vice versa,” said Carmen. She apologized for butting in on our conversation, but said she wanted to excuse herself—she needed to compose herself before her reading.

  I watched two men in white jackets setting up chairs, another filling goblets with ice water from a cut-glass pitcher. Shortly afterwards, the man who had introduced himself to me earlier cleared his voice in the microphone and, when he had the crowd’s attention, said that—he hesitated, and I prayed he would at least remember her name—Carmen María would read first and her translator would follow. Those who didn’t have glasses in their hands clapped, so the applause sounded a bit thin and I began to wish I was safe under the covers in my round bed back at the Ritz.