How should I know? said Toussaint, surprising Tom with his sudden surliness. You must make an offering and find out.
How much? said Tom and when Toussaint named an absurdly high price Tom said that’s too much and they settled on one hundred gourdes. Tom told Dolan the houngan had agreed to perform a ceremony in Dolan’s honor and Dolan grimaced and said what a crock of shit.
Bon, come, said Toussaint and stood up, no taller than Conrad Dolan and, in his slenderness, only half the detective’s size. He led them to a lightless place in the room, a back corner sloppily partitioned from the central area by a few lengths of planking to make an alcove for an altar, which they could begin to see as Toussaint, on his hands and knees, struck matches to light the candle stubs plugging the necks of green wine bottles or stuck to the floor, a rough concrete pad where, in the strange dance of ghoulish shadows, Tom saw a drum and footstool set before the shrine itself and more dusty bottles, some empty and dribbled with wax, some surfaced with beads or half filled, he surmised, with herbal potions, an array of tawdry fetishes and talismans, no suggestion of sacred mystery in their seemingly arbitrary and whimsical selection, pink baby-doll heads and a surplus human skull, creepy only in its banality, after the scores of skulls he had witnessed unearthed in Haiti, and a femur looking like the bone a child might draw. A flag pinned to the wall with the geometric heart and veve of Erzulie Mary. Toussaint lowered himself onto the stool, the gleam of candlelight on his oily black skin, playing across his high nostrils and prominent eyes, and positioned the drum between his knees and Tom sat cross-legged before him and Connie Dolan stood back and blessed himself, muttering in a mock-weary voice that if the nuns of his childhood could see him now, holy mother of God.
The ceremony began and almost immediately Tom determined that the young houngan was a fraud. Toussaint’s stammering invocation of the lwas amounted to little more than singsong nonsense, and his inept hands slapped the goatskin head of the drum with random spurts of coherence, the rhythm faltering and re-forming, the boy lacking the skill or experience to both drum and chant simultaneously. The charade went on for several interminable minutes until Toussaint seemed suddenly to have been hit with a cattle prod, an electric charge convulsing his arms, the drum knocked from between his flailing legs, his spine arching and his eyes rolling back in his swaying head and spittle flying from his lips.
You enjoying this, Connie, Tom whispered, and Dolan said, You can’t be serious, let’s get out of here, and Tom said, No, wait.
Perhaps the youth realized he was in danger of losing his audience, or grew bored with his exertions; at any rate, as abruptly as the convulsions began they now ceased and here before them was a new Toussaint, composed and effeminate, pantomiming sensuality, speaking in a high raspy voice of her desire for Tom.
Who is here? asked Tom, and the voice said Erzulie Mary, and Tom asked her about Bòkò St. Jean and the voice said, he is with me, and refused to elaborate.
I want to know about the white woman who came to Bòkò St. Jean because she lost her soul, said Tom, beginning to believe, like Dolan, they were wasting their time.
What do you want to know about this woman? said Toussaint, acting out the voice of the lwa.
I want to know if she found it, said Tom. Did she find her soul?
Toussaint’s reaction had, for a few moments, a flash of authenticity that unsettled Tom, almost convincing him he had been wrong about this masquerade of possession. The youth’s head shook violently, the veins at his temples throbbed, his hands jittered in the air, and an alarming stream of alien language gushed from his mouth. But the spell broke when Toussaint looked directly at Tom and said in his own voice and in English, I am sorry for you.
Is that so? said Tom, also in English. And why would you be sorry for me?
I am sorry for you, Toussaint repeated, and appeared to lapse into a trance.
What the hell, said Dolan. He speaks English.
He’s faking it, said Tom. I think it’s time we left.
Did you ask him about the red motorcycle? Wake him up, said Dolan, and ask him about the red motorcycle.
In a burst of sinister laughter, Toussaint’s eyes flew open and he reached into the shadows toward the altar, shuffling bottles, looking for a particular one, finding it, raising it to his lips and guzzling, the alcove stinking with the fumes of the clairin he then poured on the floor for the lwas, and Tom’s eyes remained fixed on the rearrangement of bottles. Connie, he finally said, Jackie had a bracelet that a friend gave her. It’s there on the neck of one of the bottles.
Dolan asked if he was sure it was hers and Tom said, no question about it. What do you want to do?
Ask the kid how he got it, said Dolan. Maybe she gave it to this guy or his uncle.
I don’t think so.
When she was taking pictures. She took a lot of pictures here, right? Maybe it was a gift.
No, said Tom, standing up. It was a birthday present from her old boyfriend who she told me died. You don’t give something like that away.
Tom stepped over to the shrine and took the blue-glass bracelet off its dusty bottle and turned toward Toussaint, the strands of blue and white eyes dangling from his fingers, but with a cowed look Toussaint had no answer for Tom’s questions other than Se pa fot mwen, which he repeated several times in an injured voice.
He’s saying it’s not his fault, Tom explained to Dolan, but he won’t say what it is that’s not his fault. He asked Dolan what he thought they should do and Dolan said Let’s take him with us down to the police in Saint-Marc. The boy would not move, and when Tom took Toussaint’s arm to make him stand up he bolted from the stool and tried to run but Conrad Dolan, defying his age and weight, moved into his path with an agile ferocity, wrapping Toussaint in a bear hug, chest to chest, Dolan’s back toward the door and Toussaint wailing for Marville and Marville came.
The first explosion stunned Tom, filling the hounfour with white light and a painful bolt of sound that deafened him. Where the shot had been directed he couldn’t say. Without letting go of the boy, Dolan spun around so that Toussaint’s body shielded him from the second blast, tearing into the youth’s upper thighs and buttocks, a few of the pellets striking Dolan’s legs as well. Together still, they tumbled to the ground and Marville, in a panic, threw down his rifle and fled. They sent Gerard to Saint-Marc for help and the police arrived and soon an ambulance. Toussaint was taken to the clinic in Saint-Marc and the next day transferred to the hospital in Port-au-Prince. When he had recovered from his wounds, Tom eventually learned, Toussaint was delivered to court and sentenced to prison, the verdict not the result of any confession but based on the evidence provided by the police of Saint-Marc, who, upon further investigation, had discovered what had always been there, parked out of sight along the network of paths behind the hounfour, a small and inexpensive Japanese motorcycle, its original color only partially concealed beneath a fresh but badly applied coat of white house paint.
He would remember himself and a bandaged Dolan escorted by the police to the airport in the ripening twilight, an apologetic Woodrow Singer the only one there to see them off, telling them this wasn’t his idea, the order for their deportation came from Washington and not Port-au-Prince and I swear to you, Connie, I don’t know any of the particulars. He would remember his astonishment to find that there, in the sweltering police station of Saint-Marc’s, amid the crush of personnel brandishing their new M16s and the grinning fat-boy chief who conducted their interrogation, the composed and calming presence of a white American standing off to the side with an amused air of authority, his military bearing not particularly well disguised by civilian clothes. When the chance came for them to speak Tom said, Who are you?
The American said, The trainer, and Tom said, Army? And the guy said maybe, and Tom said, Special Forces? and the fellow said, You never know and Tom felt
a light turn on and asked, Where’s Eville? And the trainer said, Busy, and winked and then they were told it was time to go.
Back in the States, Eville Burnette stayed on his mind and, a few days after his return, when he read an archived Herald story reporting the uprooting of the renegade police chief of Cap-Haïtien by a special unit of the palace guard, Tom contacted Daniel, the AP photographer who had been on the scene, and asked to see his shots from that day and downloaded them onto his computer. In the scroll of images there was Eville, at the side of the black uniformed squad of paramilitaries from Port-au-Prince and Tom could make no sense of it, believing all along that Burnette had been orchestrating a coup, not preventing one. For several months he made an effort to contact Eville through channels in Fayetteville but nothing ever came of it and when, on a hunch, he petitioned the Air Force for the flight manifest of the C-130 that flew Renee Gardner’s body out of Haiti he was told the manifest was classified and even when he filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the manifest nothing ever came of that, either.
He remembered on the flight back to Miami Dolan’s supreme relief, despite the pain of the superficial wounds to his legs, that Parmentier was not responsible for the girl’s death and then the next day Connie had phoned him from Tampa to say Parmentier had been released from the federal penitentiary and he didn’t know where he was and good riddance and that was the last that Tom Harrington ever expected to hear from Conrad Dolan.
Several months later, Harrington, recently back from a month in The Hague, walked out of his office in downtown Miami and hailed a cab to Little Haiti, where he often liked to have his lunch and catch up on the latest news and rumors from the island, and as he sat down that day at a tiny wooden table and studied the menu scrawled in Kreyol on a blackboard behind the restaurant’s counter, a man looking very much like a storefront minister stepped up to the cashier to pay his bill and Tom jumped out of his chair, certain that he was seeing Bòkò St. Jean risen from the dead, even more certain when he approached him and looked into his eyes, but the man said No, monsieur, you are mistaken, and then in English, Have a nice day.
Tom Harrington managed, as well as anybody, the half-formed truths of love with an acceptable amount of grace and honor. He did not neglect his daughter, and sometimes he was happiest with the dog, walking the shoreline of Virginia Key, and sometimes he was most gratified helping Allison with her homework or reading to her at bedtime. Aware of her looming sexuality, Allison in her skimpy bikini at the beach, Allison in the kitchen at night wearing only a T-shirt and panties, the presence forming in her that a father had no choice but to resist, and from this struggle he felt for the first time an erotic apathy that puzzled both his wife and his lover in South Beach. Sometimes he felt that, except for his daughter, he could not name one thing about love that was unconditional, and though he loved his wife he was aware with an indifference he did not understand that he did not love her enough, that they were not the match he had hoped they would be, and when they fought their predictable and futile battles over money or the time he spent away from them, a moral crusader without the benefit in his private life of a moral center, an unimpeachable core, if there was such a thing in a human being, an attainable infallibility of virtue, he sometimes thought about leaving her and perhaps he would when their daughter had grown and was away, as she must be, on her own.
Occasionally in the lonely hotel rooms he spent much of his life in around the globe he thought as he fell asleep about ape souls, something that bothered him, the six-million-year split from a common ancestry. What was in an ape’s soul? Was it very much different than what was in his? In our own ability to see and confirm ourselves, had our rise as a species been propelled by one simple skill, the slick repackaging of our brutish heritage into an alliance with the divine? Thus, men have souls. Thus, apes are without. Thus the ordination of violence. And this—When a nation lost its soul, where did that soul even come from to begin with? What was the genesis of a nation’s soul? The answer seemed only to be war.
He had told her the story now and she wanted to hear it once more. I need to understand this, his wife had said, but he couldn’t remember precisely what he had said, where the lies mixed with the truth, where the truth diverged from his imagination, the correct order of fact and fabrication, and he knew he could not tell it in the same way again.
Book Two
How Peace Begins
Croatia 1944, 1945
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
During the final days of the German occupation of Croatia, there was an eight-year-old boy in Dubrovnik, Stjepan Kovacevic, who would be introduced in the most indelible fashion to his destiny, the spiritual map that guides each person finally to the door of the cage that contains his soul, and in his hand a key that will turn the lock, or the wrong key, or no key at all.
In Stjepan’s case, the map was drawn by an act of retribution: the brutal death of his father, beheaded before his eyes. One apostate held the boy with a forearm clamped across his throat, the canvas sleeve of his uniform reeking of paraffin; two men escorted his mother upstairs for interrogation, three more forced his father to prostrate himself before the hearth in the kitchen, then side-kicked his severed head into the fire like a soccer ball, the boy crying as much from shame as terror because for months now, as the war turned against his people, he had been ravaged by hunger, and the smell of his father’s sizzling flesh made his mouth water pitilessly and his stomach foam.
The Serb who held him said, And this one?
The Bosnian partisan who had wielded the crude saber stepped away from the headless corpse, muttering introspectively. Who is the beast? Is it me? I am a slayer of beasts. Who kills children? I do not kill children, even fascist brats with fathers who kill children, he said and came and stooped before the boy, taking his measure, a child of Europe in the hands of the barbarians.
Stjepan, who would not look at him, remembered little more than the stink of black tobacco steaming from his mustache, the splatter of paternal blood on his greasy trousers, the winter mud streaked on his boots.
My name is Kresimir mrtvac, he told the son of the former Ustashe vice commander who had orchestrated the pogroms in central Bosnia. Kresimir mrtvac, Kresimir the corpse. He was one of Tito’s Partisans, Serbs and Bosnians, Communists and Muslims, men who shit on God and men Stjepan would spend the rest of his life calling, as all Slavic Christians, Roman and Orthodox, called such men who bowed to Mecca, the Turks. Their actual origin hardly mattered.
When you are a man, Kresimir said, come find me, okay, and I will kill you then. He lifted the boy’s quivering chin with blood-slick fingers. Yes? Promise? But Stjepan kept his eyes downcast and finally the Bosnian chuckled drily and patted him on the cheek as if he were his own.
Good, he said. Don’t forget.
The partisans left to continue their orgiastic purge of Dubrovnik and Stjepan stood in place, exactly where he had been released from the grip of the man who had held him, the satin pool of his father’s blood inching toward his shoes. Over the crack and stutter of gunfire in the nearby rialto he strained to hear any sound from the floor above to tell him his mother was alive, not knowing then that she listened, too, lying in catatonic stillness where the men had left her in her child’s urine-smelling bed, commending to the Almighty the souls of her husband and the boy, convinced they were both lost to her on this earth but absorbed by eternity as martyrs of God and saints of the fatherland, their names already on the lips of unborn avengers. To have such a prayer to pray was a sacred honor, and lifelong.
O
utside the house the old city shrieked and whistled and banged but inside endless minutes passed in catastrophic silence until she heard the boy retching and bolted down the stairs into the kitchen in time to see him drop his father’s charred skull, which he had managed to recover from the flames with cast-iron tongs, into a pail of dishwater. She wiped the vomit from his slack mouth with a rag, the bloody smudge of handprint from his cheek, pulled his soiled sweater over his head and replaced it with two clean ones, made him put on his overcoat and gloves, scarf, and felt hat as she ran back upstairs for their documents and cache of banknotes—what was there to buy anymore with all this money? Then she packed toothbrushes and her hairbrush, a bar of homemade soap and hand towels, extra underwear and a sewing kit, jewelry with sentimental value, saints’ reliquaries and an ivory-beaded rosary blessed by the Pope, a Confirmation gift from her parents, and the few family photographs she cherished, rushed belatedly to the toilet to cleanse herself and clear her thoughts of the rape, no time for that now, buttoned a cashmere sweater on over her housedress and a stylish fuchsia wool jacket over the sweater and hurried back downstairs to where the boy stood in the ruins of his world, his face ashen and immobile, a tiny mannequin fattened by winter clothes staring eyeless into space. She made the sign of the cross over her dead husband and fished his billfold from his pocket and his gold crucifix and its chain from a pudding of blood.
We’re leaving now, she said, looking back at her headless husband as she pushed her son out the door, away once again from the city of her birth into the peril of a future known only by its past.
They fled the walled city to its outermost quays and were packed aboard the fishing boats filled with other panicked refugees that would take them that night and the next day north to Split, Ustashe-controlled and two weeks in front of the partisans’ advance, where Dido Kvaternik’s men secured passage for them on a convoy to Zagreb, the city rising from the plain in a dome of sulphurous fog, arriving two days before Christmas, 1944. In Zagreb, they shared a bedroom in his Aunt Mara’s lugubrious apartment, like a private chapel infused with grief, on the northwestern corner of Jelacic Square—Mara, his mother’s sister, widowed herself by Chetniks earlier in the war. For months it seemed they did little more than huddle together in its sunless freezing rooms, insensate, bewitched by the fizzing radio and its diabolic spew of contradictory reports, waiting for the end, leaving the apartment’s sanctuary only to plod uphill to Dolac and its barren stalls, scavenging for bread and turnips and coal, or to attend mass at the cathedral, over which his father’s cousin reigned as archbishop, spiritual leader of the land described in 1519 by Pope Leo X as Antemurale Christianitatis, the outermost ramparts of Christendom, a belated and feeble acknowledgment of a reality superior to geography—Asia meets Europe not where the seas divide the continents but here, deep in the savage wilderness of the Balkans, where empires and religions grate against each other to produce a limitless supply of bloody slush flowing east and west into the gutters of civilization.
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