The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Good luck in the mountains, said the colonel, his gaze circling around the tent. Sorry, where is your bodyguard? You’re not alone, are you? You should not go up there alone.

  Tom explained that he never traveled with security personnel and the colonel said he had been told that Tom had been assigned a bodyguard.

  I don’t know who told you that, said Tom, but it’s wrong. I have a photographer and a driver coming, that’s all.

  Then the aide-de-camp took him into town and dropped him at the Christophe, where he learned from Henri, the proprietor, that the hotel had been occupied for weeks by international police monitors and UN consultants. Two rooms remained available for tonight, but Henri would only guarantee one for tomorrow. Harrington told him brightly, We’ll make do. He checked in and stowed his bag in the room with the larger bed and hired a driver to take him to a neighborhood on the southern outskirts of the city where he met with Père Dominique, a leftist French priest who had gone underground to escape assassination during the de facto regime and had served as a contact for Jacques Lecoeur after the Americans came ashore. Dominique made arrangements for Tom to meet a pair of Lecoeur’s men where the road into the mountains ended, at the hamlet of Bois Caïman, and these men would guide him to Lecoeur. In the midafternoon, he instructed the driver to take him farther south into the countryside, to a sugar mill where he met with a representative of the old families, who presented Tom with a computer disc that contained a file on the missing persons. Then it was back to the Christophe for a much-anticipated cocktail with Jackie but when he walked into the bar and saw her wave from a table he could not even begin to comprehend why Gerard wasn’t by her side instead of Eville Burnette, out of uniform, all smiles, saluting Tom with a bottle of beer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the morning he stripped off the rank clothes he had slept in and stepped into the bathroom. The hot water was no hotter than the air and he chose the better option and showered cold, trying to rethink Jacqueline Scott’s ambiguous relationship with her camera, of no more substance than a hip ornament or stylish prop, he was sure, until they were up in the mountains and had rendezvoused with a party of Lecoeur’s men and everything went to hell. But any doubts he had back then about Jackie as a photographer had been dispelled by something Conrad Dolan had revealed during last night’s bar-stool confessions. Her interest in vodou had been genuine; she had documented the houngans and their ceremonies; her work had been good enough (or sensational enough) to merit a gallery show in Tampa.

  What, if anything, did this foretell, and did it at least mean she had mingled with the lwas with enough sufficiency to have her soul restored? When Tom Harrington asked himself that question, he was not serious. Jackie Scott, he thought, never had a soul to lose, or had long ago lost sight of it, and she had drawn him into this dark vacancy of hers with the irresistible skill of a succubus.

  Refreshed and clearheaded, he toweled off and shaved, careful not to nick himself and go home with hepatitis, then dressed in chinos and a T-shirt and went barefoot down to breakfast, Joseph so happy to see him on the veranda that he threw his arms around the American lawyer. Tom stiffened in the embrace as he looked beyond the waiter’s shoulder at the table where a rumpled and chagrined Connie Dolan sat with Gerard, who, from the conflicted look of shock and pleasure on his face, had not yet been told Tom was in town.

  I tell myself you will never come back, Gerard said in Kreyol, rising to his feet as Joseph released Tom and Tom pressed Gerard to him briefly and stepped back and Gerard lowered his voice to a mumble. The foo woman is dead, Tom.

  They continued speaking in Kreyol. Yes, I know.

  You have come back because of the woman, yes?

  It is not my business, said Tom, his eyes avoiding Dolan’s, adding that he was, in fact, leaving the island that afternoon, and inquired if Gerard was free to give him a lift to the airport.

  From the pained expression on Gerard’s rough face he understood the answer was no, his services already procured by Dolan for a trip up the coast to the police station in Saint-Marc. Dolan interrupted to ask Harrington to sit and have breakfast with them but Tom ignored the invitation and Gerard told him that, like this white man now at the table, Americans had come from Miami to speak with Gerard about the woman.

  Yes, I know, said Tom. You told them that she and I went up into the mountains.

  Yes, said Gerard. The Americans wanted to know about the north but I told them I was in Port-au-Prince and could only say what I know from what the people say.

  Bon, said Tom. Gerard, tell me. What didn’t you tell the Americans?

  Come on, Harrington, Dolan tried again. Let’s get past last night.

  Slyly, Gerard smiled. He liked this question of Tom’s. Three things, he said. The woman and man make a business with all the bad people, and the foreign people too.

  That is what I’m finding out, said Tom.

  Dolan no longer seemed interested in placating Tom. Stop acting like a jackass and speak English and sit down, he said, which provoked an outburst from Tom, who spun on his feet and took a hard step toward the table, teeth and fists clenched.

  I want you to know something, Connie. This person I’m supposed to have killed. Damn it, it was an accident.

  It wasn’t an accident, my friend. It was nothing other than self-defense, said Dolan, surrendering the irritation in his voice. You ran an ambush. I would have done the same. He pulled a chair out from the table as a peace offering. Give me the chance to tell you the rest of what you don’t know and then you can catch a flight out of here, if that’s what you want. Gerard, you too, sit. Just speak English, for fuck’s sake.

  Joseph brought a fresh pot of coffee and took their orders and Tom listened to Dolan’s encore performance, the bewildering and ultimately outlandish tale of what had happened when he saw Jackie for the second time, months after his last encounter with Parmentier and only several weeks before she was murdered. Dolan said he was at a steak house in Ybor City with a prospective client, a local woman who had requested a meeting over drinks and dinner. Her dime, so why not? A young woman dining alone in a booth along the wall smiled boldly at him and fluttered her fingers hello. She was audacious but beautiful and he thought here’s a paycheck to paycheck gal, après-office-secretary overexerting herself when the rent’s due, because he didn’t recognize her, but she was persistent and finally he stared at her long enough to realize it was Parmentier’s wife, Renee Gardner—Jackie, although he never knew her as Jackie. Her hair was dyed auburn and cut in a bob that revealed a dangle of sparkling earrings. She had put on lipstick and her nails were painted candy-apple red and she wore a black cocktail dress and high heels and flagged over a waiter to take a note she quickly scribbled on a napkin. A minute later the note was in Dolan’s hands along with a fresh scotch on the rocks courtesy of the lady. Nice to see you again, Special Agent Dolan. The woman who wanted to engage his services to discover how much her husband was really worth took one bite of the pasta on her plate and stood up, saying she’d call him, and left with an abruptness that you would be tempted to call premeditated. Dolan rattled the ice in his glass, deliberating his cue to take the drink over to Jackie’s table but she was already sliding into the chair across from him.

  The lovely Mrs. Parmentier, he said. Why not just pick up the phone?

  She looked demure and said she wasn’t good on the phone and surprise parties were fun, weren’t they, less inhibiting anyway, and he tried to overlook the element of flirtation in her voice and manner by being brusque and skeptical. In her present incarnation, less salty voluptuousness and more the perfumed glamour of sophistication and class, he had to keep reminding himself—it was like a commercial jingle looping around in his skull—This chick married a fuckhead. Anything multiplied by zero equals zero.

  How’s Jack?

  Jack was on a busine
ss trip down south, she said, and after a long pause, waiting for Dolan to say something, she told him she was worried about her husband.

  Why, because he’s the light of your life?

  That’s rude, she said but he could see the actress behind the pout, that she wasn’t really insulted.

  Dolan apologized, almost guilty for his instincts toward her. How’s the photography going? he asked, but she didn’t want to change the subject and said that Parmentier was in over his head down there and didn’t seem to know it, or didn’t seem to care, and she suspected it was all going to end badly if something wasn’t done. It was not a lament but a report, a briefing so shorn of tones of distress as to be almost scripted.

  Down where? asked Dolan.

  Okay, Special Agent Dolan. You’re going to bullshit me, right?

  Retired, said Dolan. Call me Connie.

  Well, Connie, Jack’s fucking over your people at the Bureau, did you know that?

  How would I know that?

  Parmentier liked to boast to her about the Tampa operation but she hadn’t believed the stories until they went to Haiti together and there waiting for them was an emissary from God and country, an absurdly pious disciple named Woodrow Singer, who would meet them for Saturday lunch on the beach up the coast at a place called Moulin Sur Mer. If Jack worked with the Bureau in Tampa, she told herself, then she shouldn’t be surprised or alarmed that he was doing it in Haiti as well. Perhaps she should have been proud of him, a private citizen and businessman answering the call of his government. Even in the heat of the tropics Singer wore a coat and tie and linen shirts with a small gold crucifix monogrammed on each cuff, never removed his aviator sunglasses, always ordered boiled lobster and meticulously picked its shell, cleaned his hands with packaged wipes before and after eating, always drank bottled water he had personally imported from his home state of Utah, and inevitably made enthusiastic reference to the earthly benefits of salvation by a higher power. Jackie would roll her eyes. Parmentier would smile and nod agreeably and burp, amen, blasted on rum sours. At the end of these lunches it was understood she would go for a swim and Singer would deliver to Parmentier a list of names, usually Near and Middle Easterners, and the following week Parmentier would go to an art gallery in Port-au-Prince owned by a Syrian and the Syrian would have photographs and basic information about the men on the list and he and Parmentier would put together passports and visas for the men and Singer probably expected that only the names on the list were given new identities and documents.

  The problem is, said Jackie, Jack’s been double-dipping on the paperwork, forging documents for people who aren’t on the list, or forging an extra set with different identities for some of the men who are on the list.

  Huh, said Dolan, trying to understand why she was telling him these things.

  That’s it? Huh?

  From the sound of things, Dolan suggested, she seemed rather involved in it all.

  Honestly, no, she said. She kept her distance, she claimed, consumed by her own projects. But sometimes he needed her to translate documents from Arabic, she said, so I know more than I want to about what’s going on.

  Arabic? He had forgotten Parmentier bragging about her proficiency with languages. Why do you know Arabic?

  Because I do.

  And just what is it that’s going on? asked Dolan.

  That’s why I’m talking to you. What’s going on, Connie?

  The one thing I don’t understand, he said. You’re smart, beautiful, talented.

  Blah blah blah.

  What are you doing with a criminal like Jack Parmentier?

  A criminal? she scoffed. He’s not so different than you. Why don’t you ask yourself that question?

  Dolan couldn’t bring her into focus. What’s your angle here, Renee? Money? Drugs? Outlaw thrills? Sympathy for the devil? Was she one of those otherwise straightlaced girls who sought out rogues as an avenue of rebellion against their demanding fathers?

  I don’t care about drugs, she said dismissively, and he said, then that would explain why it doesn’t bother you that your husband is a narcotrafficker. She smirked and said if the government didn’t mind, why should she? And, anyway, how could she explain herself or her motives let alone the unlikely passions of her heart to a mind as unimaginative as Dolan’s. You are the product of a system, she told Dolan, and I am the product of a vision.

  Well, you’re right, honey, I ain’t Dostoyevsky, said Dolan, but I ain’t wrong, either. You either have a predictable, and predictably dirty, reason for marrying this lowlife, or you should think about visiting your mental health care provider because you’re certifiably nuts.

  Let’s stop, she said, fixing her eyes on Dolan. She needed him to be her friend and ally, she needed his help. I want you to tell Parmentier to stop doing what he’s doing. I mean with the Arabs.

  You have a thing with Arabs?

  Trust me, she said. Make Jack stop before he gets himself killed.

  Really? said Dolan. Who’s going to kill him?

  Who knows, she said dispassionately. People are lining up. Could be moi, she said with a flippant toss of her hair.

  Dolan thought, with my blessings, sweetheart. He knew better than to guffaw, having learned long ago the cold truth good citizens spent their lives denying, that the right context could rip away every boundary of self-restraint from the most virtuous person, but his eyes reflected bluff and she did not react well to his assessment of her threat. Slipping off a shoe under the table, she suddenly jabbed him hard with her stockinged heel, the quick stab of pain taking away the breath he had meant to use to ask her—Why? But did it really matter why, because he knew if she was being straight with him she was doomed, tomorrow, next month, next year, condemned already and sentenced to death.

  You’re taking me for granted, Agent Dolan.

  Goddamn, he hissed. Don’t you think just leaving him is the better option here?

  I’m serious, she said. And you fucking know it.

  Conrad Dolan hadn’t been kicked square in the balls by a female since grade school. He was furious and, inexplicably and ridiculously, smitten by the fantasy of roughhouse sex with Parmentier’s overreaching wife. I’ll talk to him, he promised, but Renee Gardner was dying on the side of a road in Haiti before he even thought about trying.

  Tom Harrington had made himself into a listener, the most reliable asset of his personality, there at the center of the self he believed in. Listening, he had come to understand, was his vocation, his gift. Even as a child, raised like so many other children by an unedited mother with too much to say and a father who practiced the mental golf swings of inattention, Harrington determined that although not everybody felt the need to talk, most people did, compelled to spill out their stories and opinions to any audience within range but very few found value in the art of listening, least of all to themselves, or found virtue in the discipline of concentrated silence. Harrington, though, had successfully adapted, perhaps helped to create, the persona of a new genus of roving therapist, a global receptor, circuit rider for the world’s unattended pain, patient and respectful, habitually sincere, gently prompting yet diligent in his questioning. The difference between his previous life as a correspondent and his life as an activist began where the listening stopped.

  Even so, concerning all things Jackie, he found himself frequently lapsing into a form of preoccupation that seemed without shape or content, unalert and dull, distracted by the inability of his own mind to cease its rummaging with no purpose through a bin of images that the woman had left behind in his life, sucking him inward like a dark force. Conrad Dolan had stopped talking and Tom, not listening, knew he had just been told something earth-shattering but he could not yet summon the mental energy to align the pieces into a logical whole. I don’t have a stellar intellect, he ofte
n reminded himself as a way of taking his bearings, I simply have one well-calibrated to manage an endless assault of practicalities, so let’s get to work. But what was before him now seemed beyond him, this gathering of shifting shapes, foremost his own, inspired, if that was the word, by Jackie. He felt dreamy and stupid and wasn’t going to embarrass himself by asking Dolan to repeat the story and so he cracked and peeled the shells off his soft-boiled eggs and sprinkled their tops with pepper and unconsciously gagged himself, an entire egg stuffed in his mouth.

  Counselor? said Dolan.

  Tom nodded and kept nodding, his mouth full, not chewing for some reason that made him feel childish and queer. Without regard to Conrad Dolan, Gerard broke the silence, speaking again in Kreyol. The second thing, Gerard told him, was that he had never said anything to the Americans about the day they all went to Saint-Marc, when the woman called herself Jackie. And Tom, the third thing is this: I took the woman myself to Bòkò St. Jean’s, not once but many times. Tom nodded, his eyes widening with curiosity, still unable or unwilling to chew or swallow. He raised an imaginary camera and clicked a picture. Gerard shook his head and said maybe but he didn’t know, he would stay in the car or sometimes leave her there and spend the night in Saint-Marc and return for her in the morning.

  Harrington, said Dolan. What the fuck are you doing?

  His eyes bulging, Tom nodded energetically at Dolan, then across to Gerard and back to Dolan again, never having known himself to behave like this, the egg sealed behind his lips like a concealed bomb, and rising from his stomach to block its descent a dread telegraphed the obvious, that whatever happened next would trigger his dissembling. He needed to be away from Haiti to have this discussion, he needed to be in his office in his own friendly chair at his own desk with a notepad on the blotter and pen in hand, glancing in front of him at the framed photographs of his family and Dolan across from him in another chair, the air-conditioning cooling down their imaginations, the walls lined with the books of his ideals and his assistant bringing them coffee, and files and the safe and familiar vista of downtown Miami and its circling buzzards out the window. They needed neckties and briefcases to get through this. They needed talking points and an agenda and a realizable goal. He should be able to pick up the phone and say to Dolan, Sorry, I have to take this call.