He missed her nod and finally she said quietly, Okay.
Do I believe in the soul? Yes. What is it? I don’t know and neither do you. An eternal essence within us? Sure, why not? The life force that appears from darkness and reenters darkness or, here’s the happier scenario, appears from light and reenters light, and is not flesh and is our single connection to what some of us call the divine or the infinite or the force behind it all. Do I believe that something like that is in me? Yes, I choose to believe that. Do I believe I can lose it? I don’t know. If I lose my shoes at the beach I can go back the next day and find them or just go buy another pair, but if I’m at the beach and lose my arm to a shark, that arm’s not coming back, is it? When we say someone has lost his soul, what are we saying? That somehow that person has been emptied, that a light has been extinguished at the center of his being. He sold his soul to the devil, we say. What happens to people who lose their souls? They seem to die and be reborn in order to breed horror and misery in the world. Whether they are full of hatred or not, they seem to be without love, loveless, emptied of all love, the enemies of love. Where do those souls go, and are they coming back? Maybe you can buy a new one, but where, and with what currency? Penance? A life dedicated to good acts? Am I being serious enough for you, Jackie? And then he sighed loudly with his own frustration, unhappy with his release of words, unhappy that he had even bothered to say them, shadows cast by shadows.
She did not shrink from his unfriendly monologue but instead seemed emboldened. It’s me, she declared. I’ve lost my soul.
Now how in the fuck did you lose your soul? Tom said. This confession was absurd and bewildering and he did not want to hear it and he did not know what she expected of him and as far as he was concerned she was in every sense too young and too affluent to be having a genuine spiritual crisis, something that would pass out of her system like a kidney stone, naturally although not painlessly, in another year or two, and even then she would not be thirty.
I don’t want to talk about it.
How could you have possibly lost your soul?
I am not going to talk about it.
Look, metaphorically, everybody experiences—
Fuck. Metaphors. Fuck. Metaphors. Her words brittle and sharp and clipped. I’m not talking about my imagination. This is not about the imagination.
What she said he didn’t understand, yet when he tried again—We all have our demons—he sounded fatuous even to himself.
That’s not what I’m talking about, she insisted.
What in the hell are you talking about then? What is this all about?
Believe what you want.
All right, Tom said. Look, I believe you.
I don’t care, she blurted childishly, her hands fluttering upward, and Tom thought, Oh, brother, ain’t this entertaining! and concentrated on the unimpeachable reality of the road.
There were trees now shading the highway, generous and lovely, and two-room clapboard houses side by side by side in the coolness beneath their canopy. The dusty shoulders thronged with pedestrians, bicyclists, children in school uniforms, wandering goats. Occasionally a boy would lean out toward the car, dangling a line strung colorful with reef fish or gripping a brace of spiny lobster by their antennae. Jackie did not remark upon this sudden oasis of life surrounding them and they rode through the village in the new silence of the contorted intimacy of her secret. They now knew each other less by knowing each other more—at least Tom felt so. The allure had drained from the tantalizing shell of her perfection, the robust clichés of her youth and unblemished femaleness, and he felt pointlessly manipulated. Their conversation had not been engaging, it had only been weird and dumb, and Jackie’s alleged loss of soul and the evasiveness that followed, her refusal to yield as much as a particle of explanation to appease Tom’s incredulity, seemed a variation on cock teasing, and he thought again, cruelly, glibly, How many years are required of us on this earth before you can plunge yourself into serious moral complications and actually have a soul worth losing, or do we arrive afflicted by the original sin of our births? His brain idled on such thoughts, the abandoned catechism of a Roman Catholic upbringing, as they accelerated away from the village and Jackie, to his astonishment, continued her inquiry.
Do you think he can help me? she said.
Who? Help you what?
This voodoo person. Help me get my soul back.
I don’t know. Ask Gerard.
I am a Christian, Gerard protested from the backseat, and Tom doubted whether he had heard such nonsense between blans in his entire life.
But he’s a priest, right? she persisted. A type of priest.
Yes, a houngan, Tom said again. The best ones were keepers of an encyclopedic knowledge of folk medicine, they were repositories of the history of their people, they single-mindedly preserved the songs and rituals that shaped the Haitian psyche, they practiced healing and they battled against darkness, as any truly religious person does. The worst ones trafficked in nightmares, when they weren’t trafficking narcotics. I don’t know if this houngan in Saint-Marc is a good one or a bad one, he said, and if she was determined to see a priest, why not start on more familiar ground and go speak to a Catholic priest, someone with whom she might at least share a culture and common language of faith.
They don’t know anything, she said matter-of-factly. They’re part of the whole fucked-up problem.
You’ve talked with them then? he asked, and received, in the peripheral frame of his glance, a thin-lipped frown and an angry toss of her head in reply. No answer. No comment. My spokesperson will have a statement for you in the morning. Jackie was beginning to rattle him. Lost your soul, eh? Tell me about it. Lost your soul? Listen, who cares? He tried to stop caring, that occupational habit, but for Tom caring was a need, however deformed, and he couldn’t make it go away, he could only be a smart aleck about it.
They crested a bald hill at a speed that caused a moment’s sensation of levitation inside the car, the threat of being sent airborne, and Tom swerved wildly to avoid a broken-down tap-tap parked half in the road, throwing Jackie into his side, their first touch, neither of them wearing seat belts. The lurching awoke Gerard out of his doze and Tom heard him clear his throat and spit out the window—the money was a godsend but Tom was fully aware that this day so far was beneath Gerard’s dignity, chauffeured around like some missionary boy—and Jackie, straightening up in her seat, seemed utterly unconcerned with both Gerard’s presence and Tom’s recklessness. Below them, the white sand of a crescent, palm-lined beach beckoned like a postcard, and they descended to where the road hugged the coast between sheer mountains and turquoise sea, such an inviting sea, the moist brine of its air a balm to the senses.
Several more miles up the road they flew by the entrance to the Moulin Sur Mer and went on to Saint-Marc and through the decaying hive of its center to the northern outskirts, in search of the metaphysically puzzling spark of whateverness the young and beautiful and immensely troubled Jacqueline Scott had declared as her soul.
That air of unfathomability that intelligent young women cultivated—what was that about, that calculated? that subconscious? that natural? turn in the self toward the art of deception? I am more than you see, and what you see is flesh? Duality (body and soul) begets duplicity (self and self and self and self, and who could dare say which one was real)? In any case, Jackie’s soul was gone.
Don’t laugh, she said, and Tom didn’t, but neither did he mourn or suffer, as one might, somewhere in one’s own soul, at the loss of another.
CHAPTER FIVE
Above the city, high enough to give everything below its balconies the distance required to establish an appreciation for the disfigured beauty of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel Montana, flush from the windfall of the occupation, had renovated its terraces since Tom Harrington’s last v
isit, adding brooklike fountains and goldfish ponds, an oval poolside bar, a marble-tiled dining area open to sweet mountain breezes. Bougainvillea cascaded over the ledges into the clouds that passed above another less generous world. The elevation was not simply a physical fact of the hotel but a bracing state of mind as well, a reassuring sensibility, suggesting that the Montana was a fortress and sanctuary, evidenced most bluntly by the shotgun-carrying guard manning its steel gate, a secure oasis of calm luxury and competent service, a symbolic outpost for the globalization that Americans and Europeans, in their smiling overconfidence, were convinced would be tomorrow’s remedy for what ailed poor Haiti. The United Nations ran its office out of a ground-floor apartment; corporate businessmen met superbly dressed government ministers on the patio for lunch. Dignitaries stayed here, foreign-aid impresarios, mainstream correspondents intolerant of local color and unreliable phone lines, and now men like Conrad Dolan, private detectives on open-ended expense accounts. Scruffs lodged downtown at the infamous Oloffson, which Tom preferred, falling asleep to the disturbing lullaby of gunfire beyond the compound’s walls, although more often than he would have liked the nature of his business had made him a guest at the Montana, where his status as a professional would inflate in proportion to the surroundings. At least at the Oloffson, Tom reasoned, you knew you were in Haiti, not hovering above it with all the answers.
He left his bags and passport with Dolan, who lingered at the front desk, waiting for an introduction to the manager, and took a stool at the small bar off the lobby, the only customer and a greedy one, silently imploring the bartender to hurry with his rum sour, then drinking it down in gulps and ordering another, his thoughts clotted with the once living Jackie. He wanted to feel more for her—the anguish of her mortality and the terrible fullness of grief—but it wasn’t there; wasn’t, at least, available, and what he did not want to feel was what he seemed most in danger of, an ugly spreading stain of guilty relief that she was as far out of his life as the dead could be. But she was dead and he could not tell himself he was glad about it.
In a trance of return and memory, he gazed out toward the lobby as Connie Dolan stepped into it, paying a bellboy to carry the luggage to their rooms and Dolan then removed his blazer, hooking it over a shoulder with two fingers, turning and planting his feet to the expanse of the room, fixing himself into place with a predatory scan but there was nothing, nobody to merit his attention—two middle-aged white women on a bamboo-print couch sharing a pot of tea—until through the archway of the bar he spotted Tom, who regarded his approach for the first time with a healthy measure of suspicion.
Dolan eased himself down on an adjacent stool and wanted to know what Tom was drinking and they had an end-of-a-long-day contretemps, a testy little argument about whether Barbancourt or Havana Club, Flor de Caña or some swill Dolan had tasted in Bogotá, was the best rum in the world, and then as if to spite Tom, he ordered a vodka tonic and offered the gratuitous opinion that rum was an inferior liquor regardless of where it was manufactured or by whom. They shared a minute of petulance, nothing to say to each other while they finished their round and then backed up and began a fresh start with another, watching mindlessly the vivid green limes in the bartender’s black fingers, sliced and squeezed.
What was her name anyway?
Who? Dolan cocked his head just far enough to acknowledge Tom’s drink, Tom’s hand on his drink, if not Tom himself.
Dolan’s cooling into dyspeptic impersonality, both puzzling and a growing irritation, seemed to serve final notice that their relationship would not enjoy the harmony Tom had expected, that far from being Dolan’s guide and counsel, he felt himself being drawn into some vaguely macho competition, Dolan willing to challenge every trait of Tom’s, every insignificant decision and idle preference, on the base scorecard of who’s winning and therefore who’s not. Tom told himself to try not to make too much of it, that Connie Dolan was a cop and he was just being a cop, a big nasty dog, hard-nosed, mistrustful, and untrustworthy, not his sudden best friend or any friend at all. Jackie’s real name, Tom said with more sincerity. Back at the airport you said Jacqueline Scott was not her name.
Dolan shook his head and grinned, easing the tension between them. Dorothy Kovacevic.
You can’t expect me to believe that.
Born and christened Dorothy Kovacevic.
Oh, Christ, that’s awful, said Tom. That’s like a brand name for old women in Chicago. Dorothys wore shapeless blue wool coats. Babushkas tied under hairy chins. Breath rank with stewed cabbage.
I guess she felt that way, too. Her family and friends called her Dottie. Mother was from the Midwest—Kansas, Missouri, one of those . . . that might explain Dorothy. Her father was Croatian, immigrated after the war, ended up in the diplomatic corps. But Dorothy Kovacevic isn’t her real name, either. When she was still a toddler, the father legally changed the family name to Chambers. Has a nice all-American ring to it, I guess was the point.
Dottie fits. So, why Jacqueline Scott?
Why Renee Gardner? said Dolan, not looking to Tom for the answer, but explaining that Renee Gardner was the name she had used on her marriage license to his client.
Tom was flummoxed by what seemed to be a private and complicated joke—the surplus of names, this strange proliferation of make-believe. Dottie, Jackie, Renee . . . Get it?
No.
He knew more than one person who had cried Time’s up! on whoever they happened to be at some stage in their lives, the season of their happiness shifting underneath them. A salesman who wanted to be a doctor, a mother who no longer wanted to be a mother, Tom himself a journalist who walked off the beat and out of the newsroom and went to law school, but none of them changed their names every time they changed their minds about who they were. Yet there was in him a general sense of women in constant passage from one identity to the next, starting with their own biology. Could a woman even recall a self without breasts and hips, or remember loving the firmness of those breasts and hips after the trial of childbirth or the malfunctioning furnace of menopause. Every woman he had ever known who woke up one day sick and tired of something in her life by lunchtime had lopped off her hair for the superficial relief of becoming someone else. The daily cosmetic painting and repainting of identity seemed to create a psychic disconnect between who a woman was and who she needed to be in her dissatisfaction with herself, and how, in the midst of all this flux and fabrication, the redirection and repackaging and metamorphosis, was a man supposed to hold a clear idea of who any woman, even the one closest to him, was? And yet to know a woman too well . . . was that a greater or lesser option? There were good answers, Tom knew, and answers that were very, very bad.
Who does that? he wanted Connie Dolan to tell him. Who needs so many aliases?
Dolan peered at him not unkindly and told Tom he had been around the block enough to know the answer—criminals, cons, crazy people. Actors, spies, strippers. Runaways. Refugees.
Harrington’s first reaction was to resist these categories but he sighed and said, So which was she?
You tell me.
Maybe none of the above.
Maybe all of the above.
Come on, Tom snorted. A stripper?
I’m serious, my friend.
She was a lost soul.
What the fuck’s a lost soul? That’s everybody and nobody. We’re all lost souls, are we not? Let me ask you this—do you believe in original sin?
No. What kind of question is that?
You’d be better off if you did. Because then the governing principle in your life would be the rising up, not the falling down. Repair and improvement. You see what I’m saying?
But Tom ignored Connie Dolan’s barstool theology except to say that Jackie—he could not think of her as other than Jackie—traveled with an entourage of demons and so maybe, said Tom,
taking quite a leap, her death was a mercy killing, an exorcism, maybe she welcomed her death, the fucked-up bitch—anyway, that was Tom’s theory on his third round of rum sours and Dolan stared at Tom with a derisive smile bunched to one side of his mouth and said, What a load of shit, and went to his room to shower before dinner. Harrington moved to the poolside bar and watched the darkness seep down the mountain into the city and the lights, one by one, make it lovely.
I usually don’t drink so much, Tom said, coming late to breakfast on the sunny terrace where Dolan, more casually dressed than the day before—polo shirt, blue jeans, running shoes; the meringue of his hair damply flattened—stabbed sections of papaya from a bowl of fruit salad.
I usually do, said Connie Dolan.
Monsieur, Harrington called to a waiter walking past. Café, s’il vous plaît. Omelette avec jambon et fromage. Turning back toward Dolan he asked, What’s the plan?
They had not talked about a plan at dinner but instead Tom had pushed his griot around on his plate in a fog of rum and occasionally listened to Dolan’s tales of his eight years with the Bureau in Puerto Rico, locking up miscreants and vermin, until Tom had abruptly held up his hand for him to stop and said he wanted to know how Dolan had discovered that he had an association with Jacqueline Scott. Dolan said he had read it in a report, and Tom, of course, did not take this information well—he could vaguely recollect shouting; oh, Christ, he wasn’t shouting, was he?—at Dolan, who made no attempt to calm him down but said sympathetically that there wasn’t much there. Just two or three lines alleging that, in 1996, Thomas Harrington, a human rights lawyer under a UN-funded contract to the Haitian government, and the deceased (Dorothy, Jackie, Renee) had traveled together to the northwestern cantonment of Limbé and, in the vicinity of the village of Bois Caïman, had been involved in an altercation of unclear nature with followers of the alleged gang leader, Jacques Lecoeur. Tom was speechless and finally croaked, That’s it? feeling a bolt of panic and then another bolt of paranoia shoot through the rum, and Dolan had eyed him curiously and said, That’s it.
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