The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  The hell you do, thought Tom, and yet he didn’t understand why he was pushing back against them when they were intent on giving him a pass, giving him what he most wanted, a reason, any reason, to stay out of the mountainous north.

  And we’re confident we know what happened down here. The two events aren’t related, unless there’s something you’re not telling us.

  Harrington shook his head without saying anything, feeling the blood drain from his face. On the intercom, the DCM told his secretary to call downstairs for Mr. Dolan to come up. Neff collected the photograph from Tom and slid it back into his file and, without their original animus, they rose to their feet and shook hands again.

  Tell me this if you can—why did she use so many aliases? That bothers me.

  She was a nutcase, said Albert Neff. According to her father. Lived in a world of fantasy. You knew her, you know the type. Am I wrong? He turned to leave the room but then turned back, feigning afterthought, a business card in his fingers. I have another theory, he said. It’s probably way off base, but if it ever starts to make you tingle, get in touch.

  Yeah?

  Maybe she was working for Dolan. You know, keeping tabs on Dolan’s boy. Wild, huh?

  Suppose that were true?

  You’ve already made the point yourself. Dolan’s boy didn’t kill anybody for insurance money, counselor. I can tell you that.

  See you around, said Tom, but the man from Justice grabbed his elbow as he moved toward the door.

  I want this prick, Harrington. He’s been running loose way past his expiration date. The problem is what the problem was—I have to go through Dolan to get him.

  Yeah? Well, good luck.

  And when I do that, counselor, I need you to do one thing for me.

  Let me guess. Step out of the way.

  That’s right, step out of the way.

  The thing is, I’m not in your way.

  Best news I’ve heard all day, he said, tugging at his sleeve to check the time. I have a plane to catch back to Miami. Are you on the flight?

  No.

  You should be on the flight.

  Neff disappeared and the DCM’s secretary marched Tom out of the office and down the hall to an elevator, its door opened and held by a muscular man dressed almost identically to Tom in chinos and a polo shirt and running shoes, smiling warmly at Harrington as if they were old friends. Got a minute? he asked, and Tom looked at him blankly and said, Just tell me what’s going on so I can get out of here.

  Here’s what you need to know, said the guy. Parmentier did not kill his wife.

  Why do you say that?

  I know Jack Parmentier. He’s solid.

  Solid?

  He was doing important work down here. You know what I’m saying.

  You’re saying he was an agency asset.

  I don’t believe I said all that.

  Excuse me, you said that he was so devoted to his lovely wife that under no circumstance would he cause her harm.

  I’m saying under no circumstance would he ever jeopardize the project he was working on.

  The project?

  The project.

  So then, who killed her? And why?

  Maybe you might have some idea about that.

  What the fuck is this? Everybody seems to think I’ve been appointed independent counsel on the Jackie Scott case.

  I’ve heard you’re the kind of man who can’t stand the thought of a killer going free.

  Just about every killer I’ve ever met in Haiti is dancing around in the streets, having a good laugh. Some of them even happen to be your assets.

  The elevator opened on the ground floor and Tom’s fellow passenger caught the closing door as Harrington stepped out into the hall. I know you’re the type of man who can’t look the other way, he said with a wink. You know what I’m saying.

  Harrington began to walk toward the chairs in the waiting area. He took a seat, nodding at the receptionist behind her desk, who picked up a ringing phone and nodded back at him and said, Excuse me, are you Mr. Harrington? holding out the receiver. It’s for you.

  Mr. Harrington, said the voice in the phone, this is Special Agent Woodrow Singer. I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee. Alone, if you don’t mind.

  Let me get back to you on that, said Harrington, returning the receiver to the receptionist. When he turned around, there was a black man occupying his former chair, sphinxlike, his eyes obscured behind a wrap of sunglasses, a chain of fat gold links around his neck, oversized rings on his long fingers, pink scar on the side of his chin. Haitian, Harrington had to believe, and of course thug, except for the fact he wore a lanyard around his neck from which hung an embassy security badge. Harrington sat down, keeping an empty seat between them, and grimaced. The black man shifted in his chair toward him as if he might speak, but didn’t. Harrington, staring back at him, finally did.

  You want to tell me something, right?

  He spoke with a Brooklyn accent in flawless and customarily vague Kreyol. His business was narcotics. Production or distribution? asked Harrington, but the joke went unappreciated. In this business, the fellow said in a low voice, he had been watching certain people, a man and a woman and another man, you know who I am talking about, he said, and these people were doing this thing, and it was his business to stop these people from doing this thing, but each time he tried to stop them, other people stopped him from stopping them. Do you understand, mon ami?

  Yeah, said Harrington, these people you were watching had very big friends.

  Exactement, monsieur.

  And you are saying that this man who I came here with today knew this woman, this dead woman.

  Exactement.

  But this man has never been to Haiti.

  Haiti is not the only place to know this woman.

  Okay, thanks, said Harrington, switching to English, and if you see Dolan tell him I said to go fuck himself, and then he felt himself detach from it all, sleepwalking through the turbulence, and he went out from the embassy and drove straight to Petionville, left the SUV that Dolan had rented in the car park of the Hotel Montana with the key in the ignition, checked out of his room, and then telephoned the airlines only to learn there were no seats available to Miami until the following day. He booked the next day’s afternoon flight and then took a taxi to the Oloffson, checked in for the night, and ate his lunch on the veranda, ignoring familiar faces, remaining at his table until twilight, speaking off and on with Monsieur Richard, the hotel’s owner, who came intermittently to sit with him—Have you seen Gerard? No. If you see him tell him I want to talk to him—and then retired to the bar. Conrad Dolan found him there later that evening, and threw himself down next to Harrington and said, seething through clenched teeth, So how many scoops of bullshit were those assholes able to pile on your cone, Tommy Boy?

  You knew the girl, you bastard.

  Yeah, I did, and what of it? said Dolan. You killed a guy.

  Did I? said Harrington, quick and churlish. Then his stomach tightened and seized and his voice weakened. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

  Oh, you wouldn’t know, would you? You never stopped to check it out.

  Is that in the report too?

  Yeah, said Dolan, waving for the bartender’s attention. I seem to remember something like that.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  You could see it as Tom’s punishment for her, a token administration of penance, his instructions to Gerard to keep going through Saint-Marc. He wanted to stop instead at one of the hotels along the Cote des Arcadins where they could sit at a bar in perfumed shade, immune from the everyday frenzy and crush of a town like Saint-Marc, the monotonous wearying attention paid to their whiteness. He wanted
none of that tax on his energy this afternoon, but then why did he speak to Gerard in Kreyol if not to prevent Jackie from understanding the conversation, and of course she was going to understand it soon enough, pointing out one shop and then a second that looked like it might sell bottled water or soft drinks, only to be ignored by Gerard while Tom played dumb. Gerard threaded his way methodically through the rubble of the town’s central market, the channel of vendors and peasants and animals and trucks and tap-taps and cyclists opening and closing in front of him, cresting and ebbing against the sides of the SUV, streaking its dust with their sweat. Finally she snarled at Gerard. Tom explained what they were doing. Frustrated, she plundered her camera bag for a lemon drop and sucked on it angrily and loudly for a few seconds. Tom expected her to stay sulky like the spoiled child he was tempted to believe she was but then she surprised him and resigned herself to her status as obedient passenger, proceeding without complaint, stoic and immobile for the next half hour to the coast.

  When he saw the sign marking the long entrance to Moulin Sur Mer, Gerard downshifted but Tom told him keep going, today for some reason he wanted to bypass this preferred and dependable watering hole in favor of exploring one of the lesser known hotels farther south, by far more ordinary and modest resorts that he had always wondered about—who stayed there? Was the service adequate? Were the rooms clean?—but always flew past on his trips between Port-au-Prince and the north. Visible from the road, the most modern-looking was a two-storied building of whitewashed stucco and clay-tiled roof with what he could pretend was Mediterranean appeal; eight or ten units a floor, he guessed, and imagined small balconies overlooking a poolside bar and a private strand of beach and the beautiful water. If it had a name, he couldn’t remember, but as the hotel came into view in a grove of palms and mango trees, Tom told Gerard to turn in.

  The car park was empty, its normal condition, Tom figured, except on weekends. The glass double doors leading inside were unlocked but the lobby was empty too—deserted, its check-in counter coated with a layer of grime and the puddled wax of candles, the splayed wires of a phone line dangling from a wall. But the obvious was never the final word in Haiti. Somewhere on the premises would be a caretaker married to a shotgun; otherwise the building would have been cannibalized, antlike, down to its skeleton, its doors and windows carried away, the frames themselves ripped from their rough-outs, even the floor tiles pried up, painstakingly cleaned, resold. Jackie wandered seaward through the breezeway, looking for a bathroom. Tom and Gerard remained in the lobby, calling out Bonjour, expecting someone to come but no one did.

  Let’s have a look around, said Tom.

  Beyond the breezeway was a concrete patio, its surface webbed with cracks, poured to accommodate a swimming pool that although emptied remained mysteriously clean, free of rainwater or leaves or windblown trash. Seaward, behind the pool, the patio ended in a waist-high block wall, its top row composed of airy arabesques, with a passageway and railing implying a cliffside stairway down to the beach. The sweep of the view toward the horizon—the sparkling expanse of the Gonave Bay, the misty whale-backed hump of the island in its middle—was sublime, a tropic dreamscape, begging you to imagine the romance meant to unfold on the dilapidated patio: cocktails, dinner straight from the reefs, dancing with the soothing winds of the sea ruffling your partner’s hair, an ideal venue for slow, salty, languorous love most anywhere in the world but Haiti, where love was synonymous with impotence, powerless to keep any of its dazzling promises, a perverse magnet for wholesale grief, and maybe, Tom thought, whoever owned this little slice of treacherous paradise had been right to run away and not look back, if that was the story.

  He heard Gerard calling to him and turned, cheered to see him standing behind an outside bar in a shallow service area recessed below the balconies jutting from a pair of second-floor rooms. Tom joined him behind the counter and (Gerard was too timorous for this impropriety) began flipping back the tops along a row of refrigerated aluminum coolers, but the electricity was off and the bins were empty.

  Where’d Jackie go? Tom said.

  He called her name with no result and Gerard thought maybe she had gone down the steps to the plage. Together they walked across the patio to the wall and peered over the side without saying anything, just standing there watching, eyes glued to Jackie, until finally Gerard snickered and said, Oo la la. Tom, you will fuck this woman, eh? I think she would be a good one to fuck.

  I don’t think that’s the case at all, he said, surprised by his tone, meaning to express dismissive amusement but instead he had only sounded offended.

  In all fairness to Gerard, Jackie was providing him with every reason to behave otherwise, but it was unlike the circumspect Gerard to be vulgar about women, especially white women, because the ones he saw and met in Haiti he most often admired for their courage and selflessness, their disdain for privilege, and sex was a topic Tom and he almost never discussed, not in regard to their personal lives, and even those nights on the road, stuck in Cap-Haïtien or Jacmel or Les Cayes, Tom never said a word when Gerard would disappear into the darkness in search of an old girlfriend or new girlfriend or, Tom suspected, anyone at all he could find to take the edge off the all-consuming substance of death that shaped their days, returning to the hotel at breakfast hungover and grinning in a most unmarital manner.

  On one such occasion, Gerard had stirred his coffee and asked conspiratorially, Tom, you never look for woman? and Tom had answered grudgingly that Haitian women were beautiful but AIDS was a problem, wasn’t it? And besides, he was married. To his credit, Gerard didn’t scoff. But marriage had little to do with Tom’s celibacy. Although he had not slept with anyone during his time in Haiti he had, in fact, hoped it might happen not once but twice, the first with the stupendously sexy bartender at the Oloffson, a girl with the perfectly angled and proportionate features of an Ethiopian princess and the attitude of a Motown diva, the second at one of the notoriously raunchy television network parties in an apartment at the Montana, his temporary partner a sleek battle-hardened senior correspondent from one of the news weeklies intent on cutting loose and having herself a memorably wicked evening. She was wearing heels and a short black cocktail dress and invited him to dance by stepping out of her panties and throwing them merrily in his face. But the bartender wanted a relationship and a visa, not a lover who would spend more time on airplanes than in her arms, and by the time he escorted the woman from the magazine back to her room and, in the midst of a slack embrace, they toppled onto her bed, she was beyond the moment, so cross-eyed, slurry drunk that she lost consciousness midkiss and, like any gentleman, he withdrew and took himself home and masturbated.

  Despite his desire to the contrary, he never ran into her again. On the other hand he had no time for this sort of play. Month after month of tracking down witnesses and survivors, taking depositions, organizing the bone diggers, providing logistical support for the teams of forensic anthropologists to exhume and catalog the sites, writing reports for the Haitian government (the palace, the Ministry of Justice), for the UN Human Rights Commission and the human rights entities of the Organization of American States, writing reports that he could only pray would find their way into the hands of legislators and prosecutors, massaging the perpetual crisis of his preposterous budget, waiting and waiting with a phone to his ear for operators and secretaries to connect him, to put him through to anybody with a voice, until his neck went stiff and his arm went numb, and by the end of each unending day it was all he could do to unknot his bootlaces, brush his teeth and spit and fall, every cell humming with fatigue, into bed for a few hours—who had time for chasing skirts, for God’s sake?

  But now the pace and fire and crusading purpose of those days were dead-ending and here was Jackie, down below in the water, breathtakingly naked below the waist, boots and socks, pants and lilac panties, scattered behind her on the sand, the heavenly slope of her ass agleam fro
m the lick of the sea . . . and the temptation was mighty, the torment exquisite.

  Yet he had never considered his desire, how he acted on that desire or didn’t, as anybody’s business but his own, certainly not a topic to be bantered about in testosterone-heated bonhomie. There was no one—no buddy, no tennis partner, no colleague or old friend, and definitely not Gerard, an employee—that he wanted to have that conversation with, one sportsman to another, tallying scores. Years ago, he remembered reading somewhere that boys talked and men didn’t, and that insight seemed to divide the world of male sexuality correctly. More to the point, perhaps, the sudden sense of transparency Tom experienced hearing Gerard’s crude declaration made him wince; he felt caught, exposed, not necessarily ashamed but chastened, standing there looking down on Jackie not actually thinking he would sleep with her but beginning to roll out the spool of justification that might allow for it, tasting the hope of it on the tongue of his lust, and how many times a day, in an office or on the street or in a restaurant glancing up from his plate or gazing over the rim of his glass in a bar did he look at women, all variety of women, and feel just that, and then feel the hunger for what one cannot have, the eros of everyday life with its miles of locked doors, its unquenchable desire.

  He was a good enough husband and, when he was in place, a better father and did not like to think of himself as unconscionably adulterous, but he did in fact have a mistress in South Beach, an erstwhile college girlfriend from Gainesville who had had her fill of commitment—two marriages, two divorces—and now professed to be satisfied simply by no-strings sex, safe, amiable, unattached, the passion between them neither obsessive nor dulled by overuse. The arrangement seemed only right and fair to Tom. Necessary, like checkups at the family physician. A matter of health and balance and, not to be dwelled on, abundance. A release of endangering amorphous pressure, in his life much more than his body, that could not otherwise be released. Was that wrong? Yes. No. Perhaps. It was difficult to care about the wrongness of it when the rightness seemed so compelling.