The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  But Dolan could have been anybody; he was different, not because he blended in—he didn’t—but because, Tom quickly learned, he shared Harrington’s preference to look at the world through the eyes of a foot soldier or a cop on the beat, from the ground up. Most of all he loved to talk, his head an archive of stakeouts and busts running back to the glory days of J. Edgar Hoover, and he was enamored by the mystery of personality enough to preserve it from his obligation to rip and dilute and defeat that mystery into paperwork. On the island Dolan would tell Harrington the most difficult type of suspect to interrogate is a raconteur: you ask him his name and never get in a follow-up question. You hear a lot but you never really find out anything. And Tom had thought ungenerously, Dolan is talking about Dolan.

  When I was supervisor of the Bureau’s office in San Juan, Dolan said as they checked in for their flight, the only whites in a queue of Haitians, we had a saying, it was like our motto: There are only two types of Americans in the Caribbean, those who are wanted . . .

  Yeah?

  . . . and those who are not wanted.

  As they walked down the ramp and stood in a second queue waiting to board, Dolan leaned in to Tom to tell a story. The hotel in this airport, I made my last collar here before I retired from the Bureau, he began, lowering his voice. The guy was huge, six foot six, a serial killer, twenty-three victims. A tip came in about two o’clock in the morning that he was staying here, I got a backup from the Miami police force, and we came on over, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and there he is, in the hall with this little white guy. I identified myself and said, You’re under arrest, and he goes like this—Dolan’s right hand reached for his left side. He was wearing a sport coat and I said to myself, Just show me a peek of that gun and I’ll blow you away, you son of a bitch, but he didn’t have a gun on him, it was all reflex, muscle memory, he was drunk and acted instinctively. So we handcuffed the two of them and walked them outside and put them in the car and I told this Miami cop, Fuck, that guy’s lucky, I almost shot him, and the cop says, I was waiting for you to whack him and I was going to take out the witness. The little guy, we find out, is just some good samaritan cabdriver helping a drunk customer to his room.

  Dolan’s snapshots from the everyday battle of good and evil were entertaining, but Harrington didn’t know what to say. You married, Mr. Dolan?

  Connie.

  Connie?

  Yeah. Married twenty-nine years. Three kids, all grown. You?

  Yes. A daughter in middle school.

  Their seats were not together on the plane. At one point during the flight Connie Dolan unbuckled himself and Tom watched him move down the aisle toward him, not light on his feet but energetic and savvy, nodding gregariously at passengers who met his avuncular blue-eyed smile, pausing to exchange words with an older woman dressed in her Sunday finery, not uncomfortable to be a white man in a world turned suddenly black and, by any account except Haiti’s, exceedingly foreign. Even the African American community in Miami looked upon the Haitians as indecipherable hicks. Stopping at Tom’s row, Dolan combusted once more into storytelling, a Cold War tale of a morning spent in farcical surveillance of a Soviet sleeper cell in West Virginia, two agents lost on the highway, missing their exit, turning around, missing it again. Then Dolan asked about the byzantine power struggles on the island and Tom could sense tension in the men beside him, his two seatmates in the row, and although his reply was polite it was not illuminating. This was a matter not to be discussed in front of strangers, and Tom was wearied by the subject. Each time he left the island he would tell himself the situation there couldn’t possibly get worse. Each time he returned, things were worse. Haiti was postfunctional, a free-range concentration camp, and Tom had abandoned faith in the country’s ability to save itself. Haiti couldn’t find its bottom.

  Dolan wanted Tom to teach him how to greet a person in Kreyol.

  Como yé? How are you, how’s it going? They’ll answer, Na’p boulé. We’re boiling, we’re on fire.

  On the ground, inundated by the mundane details of arrival, Tom felt grateful for Dolan’s composure, his affable patience with inefficient procedure, and saw for himself that Dolan was a man who glided easily into the muddle. They shouldered their bags through customs and, outside in the steam bath, pressed themselves into the scrum of need that surrounded the terminal, a thick ring of suffocating humanity that began to percuss with Harrington’s name. TumTumTum.

  Yes, he had been gone too long. Yes, I remember you and you but just as before I am not your savior. No, he had not brought this one shoes, that one a visa.

  The sooner you relinquished yourself to somebody, the sooner you could reclaim control, and in the thicket of grabbing hands he selected two boys with familiar faces to carry their luggage across the street to the bare cinder-block building that housed the car rental agencies. The two became four became six and followed behind in a quarrelsome knot, each boy tugging at the bags, each loud boy demanding payment at the door through which they could not enter, each boy merrily given a crisp dollar bill by Dolan.

  I see you speak the universal language of shakedown, Tom said wryly, nodding at Dolan’s gold-plated money clip before it disappeared back into his pocket, and Dolan smiled at the illusion of his largesse, a good-natured businessman taking care of his staff. For the first time Tom wondered if he should consider himself Dolan’s employee; he hadn’t thought about it beyond their gentleman’s agreement—Dolan would pay expenses, the ticket, food and lodging, but beyond that there was no arrangement and Harrington supposed he could stay or go as he wished. They did seem to be in agreement about which rental company to use.

  Sir, we thought you had forgotten us, the lugubrious counter agent said with wounded dignity, putting his slack hand in Tom’s, as though the white man were another disappointment to his day.

  I did, he confessed.

  We have not forgotten you.

  No, I wouldn’t think so. Tom had managed to return one of his agency’s vehicles in very bad condition and another with bullet holes through a door panel. How are things? he asked.

  We are enjoying the freedom you give us, the agent said, to go to hell. This democracy you give Haiti is killing us.

  Tom handed the agent his driver’s license and Dolan’s credit card and a minute later Dolan looked up from the form he was signing and Harrington watched his methodical style come into focus, the script of investigative habits that he understood existed between them as both fraternal bond and ground for competition, brotherly or not. Tell me something, said Dolan, setting his briefcase on the counter, flipping the latches without opening it, and Tom listened to his conversation with the rental agent, whose expression hardened warily as he realized the white man in front of him was a type of policeman. The briefcase opened. Oui, said the agent, examining Dolan’s copy of an invoice; he was the one who had rented the SUV to the American couple several weeks ago. True, the woman was murdered, the vehicle stolen and left a short distance off the road near the swamps of Tintayen. Everyone knew these things, monsieur.

  And the man and the woman, said Dolan. Tell me your impression of them.

  I had no impression.

  Happy, sad, irritated, friendly?

  Normal.

  Dolan reached back into his briefcase and extracted a brown envelope containing a photograph of the client with his wife, the two of them side by side, lovers in bathing suits, his arm clasped around her suntanned shoulder, posed in front of a giant concrete reproduction of a conch shell that Harrington recalled having seen among the garden of landscaping kitsch at Moulin Sur Mer. Let me see that, Tom said, and took the photograph from Dolan as he pushed it across the counter toward the agent.

  Harrington released an involuntary gasp. What’s the problem? asked Dolan, and he gave Tom a hard look, studying his reaction. You okay?

 
I’m fine, he said, trying to stand straight and breathe normally. I know this woman. Jackie. Jacqueline Scott. A blade of grief twisted into Harrington and through him and then, replaced by arid pity, out, perhaps the only honest emotion he had ever felt for her besides lust and anger, perhaps the only two responses a woman like Jackie could expect from a man once she had his undivided attention.

  That’s not her name, said Dolan.

  All right, he said, steadying himself. Her hair’s cut different, and it’s been dyed, but I know her. She was freelancing here during the occupation.

  I was hoping you’d say that, said Dolan.

  You knew? Harrington’s along-for-the-ride equanimity drained into a chilling emptiness and he felt entrapped, his world contracting into Dolan’s, and for a moment on the edge of his consciousness he was aware of a doubling into a second self, his first self receding into the psychic numbing he knew so very well from his years of graveside interviews but had never, not even at the unearthing of a stadium filled with bones, experienced at a depth where everything, all the madness and pain, is meant to disappear. He was sick in the revolting airless heat of the room, on the threshold of a lifelong haunting.

  No, I didn’t know, Dolan said. I knew it was a possibility.

  Well, shit, he said, his mouth watering, and a foulness at the top of his throat as if he might vomit; he spit on the floor to try to stop the sensation. Back in Miami, Tom had not been clever in his appraisal of the retired special agent, imagining that Dolan, always talking, one anecdote after another, a stream of true-crime monologues, wanted Tom along just to have someone to attend his stories, drive the car, pick the restaurants, make everything easy.

  I was thinking, Tom said, the next time somebody invites me along on a trip, I might ask for more particulars.

  I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d come if I spelled it out up front.

  You were right.

  When Tom Harrington calmed down, he allowed that if Dolan’s client did not kill his wife, whatever her name was, then perhaps there was a small chance that maybe he knew who did, and Connie Dolan was expecting Tom to say that, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the final days of the occupation, a Hollywood director came to Port-au-Prince as a special guest of the National Palace to celebrate the great success of democracy and the inauguration of the new president, swept into office by an election free and fair in which no one felt inspired to actually vote. The director, whose work had earned him an Academy Award, had loaned his celebrity to Haiti’s cause; he had championed the refugees washing ashore in Florida, lobbied Congress, raised funds, advised the president-in-exile, spoken out at rallies in Boston and New York and Miami and, with his documentaries, had shown the world the reason for his outrage and his broken heart—the brutalities of the tyrants, the blood of the innocents. His crusade had been noble and for that he was welcomed and loved in the wasteland, and Tom Harrington himself had admired him, and still did.

  The director was part of the scene and, to a less public degree, so was Tom and Tom wasn’t entirely surprised, the afternoon before the inauguration, to receive a message at the desk of the Hotel Oloffson where he kept a small apartment, inviting him that evening to dinner with the director and his group. After a shower and a change of clothes he descended to the bar to listen to the day’s scrapings from the correspondents who regularly gathered there to decompress—most would be leaving the country by week’s end—and at the appointed hour drove himself up the darkening mountain, following its sluggish river of traffic and black exhaust, to the once luxurious suburb of Petionville and the gingerbread coziness of the Kinam Hotel.

  The entourage—several producers and assistants, a screenwriter and her husband from Santa Monica, a local driver who tripled as an interpreter and bodyguard—had already taken seats around a long table on the patio, cocktails in hand, robust and mirthful, cosmopolitan, the men in their black jeans and linen shirts, the women in flowery sundresses. Had they gathered in the Seychelles or Saint-Tropez, they would have appeared no different, and perhaps to Harrington’s discredit it had long since ceased to offend him that even the worst places on earth somehow managed to cater to the appetites of the well-heeled. He was offered the flattery of the one remaining chair at the head of the table, lowering himself on a cushion of exchanged compliments, the director to his right, a balding impish producer to his left.

  Tell me, the director said, about Jacques Lecoeur.

  Where the rutted track stopped at the bank of an aquamarine river flowing out from the rugged and still timbered mountains of the northwest lived Jacques Lecoeur—without meaning to, Tom made it sound quite like a fable. Lecoeur, a cocoa farmer and labor organizer turned, in reputation at least, guerilla chieftain, provided the tyrants with their only form of resistance in the years after the coup d’état. The generals had sent their army marching day and night up the valley where Lecoeur’s people—peasants, cultivators—resided, burning houses and schools, shooting whoever proved too slow to flee. Lecoeur and his men and their families retreated into the refuge of the high mountains, living in caves, scavenging for roots, lost to the world in the most paradisiacal landscape Tom had ever seen anywhere in the tropics. Certainly this much was true: the tyrants’ obsession with hunting down Lecoeur; and after the invasion, the Special Forces’s obsession with outtricking Lecoeur, which they were never able to accomplish in Lecoeur’s endless game of hide-and-seek. In this way, Lecoeur had become an enigmatic celebrity, perhaps the only one Haiti had to offer the world. Because the U.S. military’s intelligence units listened without discrimination to any voice that would whisper a confidence into their many ears, their profile on Lecoeur was confounding, fragmented, and contradictory: one week Lecoeur was a freedom fighter, the next a bandit and a murderer; he was a warrior messiah, or maybe a gang leader; he and his men were weaponless save for Lacoeur’s own pistol and a few M1s they had lifted from the Haitian army; on the contrary, a Special Forces intel officer once told Harrington, the Cubans were shipping them arms.

  In the course of his mission, four times Harrington had hiked up through that burnt-out valley and into the mountains to document the former regime’s crimes in the region, twice unsuccessfully with American commandos, twice with various journalists who were also Tom’s friends. When Lecoeur finally allowed himself to be found, appearing wraithlike out of the jungle to sit with them in a clearing and endure their questions, Tom didn’t know what to think about this unassuming man. He was shy, well-educated, articulate without being dogmatic—Tom theorized he was perhaps nothing more than a modern-day maroon, a runaway, a man who had refined the feral art of saving his own skin. No hard evidence suggested otherwise but, even now, months later, the bloody reports crackled down from the northwest mountains: overrun outposts, attacks on garrisons, summary executions and assassinations and torchings, each incident of vengeance attributed to the wily, bearded Lecoeur, Haiti’s Che Guevara, her Robin Hood. Personally, Tom believed none of it, but the appeal of the myth was not lost on him. Lecoeur had what moviegoers would recognize as star power.

  The director was intrigued, engaged by these accounts of a true son of the land, a reincarnation of the slave chieftains who had defeated, two hundred years earlier, the slave owners, Napoleon, and the French.

  I want to meet this guy, said the director. He wanted Harrington to take them up there.

  Who? Tom asked, mildly alarmed. All of you? Around the table, their optimistic faces bobbed excitement. It was possible, Harrington said, but the request made him uneasy. He had a mental image of leading the sweaty troupe on a ghost chase around and around the mountains, doused by squalls and roasted by the sun, their energy never flagging, surrounded by a mosquito-cloud of ragged, mesmerized children. These were not timid or naive people who readily balked at obstacles, yet when Tom explained the expedition would take a day or two to arrange and tw
o more to accomplish, with, of course, no guarantee of safety or success, that was the end of the scheme, there was not enough time to squeeze in the adventure. The entourage groaned their disappointment and picked up their forgotten menus; the director turned to the screenwriter and began a separate conversation; the waiter came and the table ordered and the director followed him back to the kitchen to say something to the chef.

  Sighing, the producer leaned toward Tom and laid his chin in the palm of his hand. We’ve touched a nerve here, said the producer. Oliver Stone’s been to Chiapas, you see, to meet Subcommandante Marcos.

  Harrington did not think more or less of the director for this explanation; famous people, powerful people, were drawn to each other, compelled to sniff out the scent of their peers and judge them equal or inferior, look into the mirror of their own importance, and he did not feel the compulsion was necessarily shallow or gratuitous or insincere, only inevitable. There was no glory left in Haiti that wasn’t hollow anyway; the grand campaigns, the highest principles, had all decayed or would soon fail, but all of them were still pretending that their swords remained sharp, that their crusades held meaning. It was simply the way you had to be in Haiti until the day arrived when you could not be that way ever again.