A matched ebony and ivory set of gym gladiators came off the elevator wearing Oakley sunglasses and bone-white safari vests and pressed jeans and Eville recognized the type before he realized he knew them, flat-headed creatures who flourished on a diet of steroids and pain, in this instance special ops studs who hopped the fence to harvest the new money suddenly available everywhere for trained killers, working now for an outfit called Dyncorps, which hired them out to the Haitian president on two-month rotations as personal bodyguards. They sat down at a café table nearby and nodded with a studied sadistic coolness and Eville nodded back.
Burnette, said the black guy, that you underneath that ’stache?
They wanted to know if he was coming or going and they wanted to know, given his new low-key style of civilian, if he was in or out, and he said, In, and the white guy of the mercenary pair said, It’s raining cash out here, bro, everything’s coming up green, and Eville told them he would always be in.
Born that way, am I right?
Yeah, said Eville. Born lucky. He stood up, finishing his beer, and knew he should keep his mouth shut but didn’t. It’s like this, he said. I fight for my country, not a corporation.
Dude, said the white guy, this ain’t 1776. It’s all the same.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Pinehurst, April 1996
It was dusk when he landed in Raleigh-Durham and at baggage claim there was a curly-gray-haired fellow in a Blue Devils jacket holding a sign with Burnette’s name on it who seemed to be exactly who he claimed to be, a man driving a cab for a living, and Eville just another customer, his fare prepaid. They drove south down Route 1 and after about ten miles, deep enough in the wooded countryside for Eville to wonder where they were going, the cabbie said, Hell’s bells, son, I thought you knew—Pinehurst, America’s first and oldest golf resort, down in the Sandhills.
You a golfer? asked the driver and Eville said he was a caddy and the old man said, For some big shot, wouldn’t it be? and Eville said yeah but he couldn’t talk about it, celebrity sensitivities and contractual privacy clause and crap like that. Okay, none of my business, said the kindly old fellow and Eville told himself sardonically, Not if you’re a taxpayer, bro.
An hour and a half later the cab dropped him at the colonnaded entrance to the Carolina Hotel and he was checked in to a suite of rooms far beyond his pay grade. Rather aristocratic for his tastes and habits but why not, he thought, dropping his gear and picking up an envelope deposited on a marble-topped side table in the foyer, reading the message—Relax and enjoy, have a drink, order room service, sleep in, we’ll see you at the pro shop at 1000 . . . Arnie. Also on the table was a bottle of Glenlivet scotch, but he had never developed a taste for his father’s refreshment of choice.
Unaccustomed to the cold, he turned up the thermostat for a wave of semitropical heat, dialed room service to request a couple of beers and added a prime rib steak medium-well and fries without bothering to look at the menu. Then he stripped and showered away Haiti, a gritty pungent coating, a concentrate of body-organ sweat and woodsmoke and fatalism, shaving the stubble along his jaw but leaving his now bushy mustache untrimmed, put on the white terrycloth robe he discovered in the closet, and flopped on the king-size bed to phone his mother back in Montana.
My sweet boy, she said in the flat steady tones of the western mountains, are you back in the land of the free?
Not that far back, he said, wishing he were home on the ranch, helping her bring the livestock out of their winter range, calf-counting and vaccinations, saddle sore, wind-burned and all that, an honest hand. She talked about the haywire spring weather and her February escape to the tangerine desert light of Santa Fe. She talked about her most beautiful friends, her beloved horses, and about who died and who didn’t or wouldn’t and before she was done she gave in to a brief lament about his brothers, the youngest a meth freak who survived by poaching up in the Yaak Valley, the middle brother a go-get-’em real estate agent in Bozeman, a prodigal son of the Highline in thousand-dollar boots, busting up the old spreads into twenty-five-acre ranchettes, which he sold to the only enemy his mother had ever confronted eye to eye, the people she called lard-tailed shitbirds from California, advancing upon her homeland with an arsenal of lawyers smart-bombing the state with zoning and environmental litigation. But she was a military wife, military widow, and military mother, self-trained to believe it was not safe to feel a free range of sentiment, and she did not linger on her heartaches but stored them away in the root cellar of her solitude, there for when she felt deprived and needed the remedy of their cruel nourishment.
When you coming back? she asked when they were about to hang up and he said, Don’t know, Mom. Soon. I love you, too.
Dad and I are proud of you, Scout, which is what she always said, the pet name, her sign-off, arm in arm with her husband, one voice forever, even after Dawson was terribly dead and terribly gone.
The food came and he turned on the television and watched a college basketball game, a rerun of Duke slaying some weakling Cinderella team during March Madness, and the steak was the best thing he had eaten in months and he ate every last fry on the plate, slathered in ketchup, and drank the two beers and felt well-treated by life and at ease with the sublime boredom of the cottony textures of peace. He woke up once in the middle of the night, listening for the drums, before he remembered where he was.
At the far end of a screened porch attached to the pro shop, affording separation if not privacy from the cleated traffic, a waiter had rolled in a linen-draped service cart bearing a flowered china pot and a six-cup setting for tea. Eville walked up on the mark at ten, wearing baggy cargo pants and an olive army T-shirt under a hooded pullover sweatshirt, his metabolism still adjusting to the underlying chill of a Carolina April morning. The welcome he received from Ben and Sammy and the undersecretary seemed authentically hale, the pleasure of his modest company clearly anticipated, although the fourth tea drinker, a black man with sulphurous eyes, whom Eville mistook as the day’s invited player, did not step forward to shake his hand. Chambers introduced him to Sanders Coleman.
Call him Sandy. He’ll be caddying with you today on the first nine.
How’s it going? said Ev, withdrawing his hand as he met Coleman’s gaze, hardened beyond an appropriate greeting. He stared back and understood, vaguely, that there was some history here. Do we know each other? he asked, and Coleman replied, Maybe you saw me around.
Where would that have been? asked Burnette.
Le Cap.
Oh, said Burnette, which black guy were you?
Coleman smiled and clapped Ev on the shoulder and that seemed to be enough to eclipse the strange tension between them. Chambers interrupted, intending to make a few points understood, he explained, before their guest appeared. First thing, he’ll be arriving any minute now from Fayetteville, said the undersecretary, which, in case you were wondering, Ev, is why you’re not coming from Fayetteville. The Friends of Golf wanted to see for themselves how things were between Burnette and their guest, lay fresh eyes on what they had reason to suspect was an unworkable relationship. You’ll understand why as the day goes on, Chambers advised Burnette.
Who are we talking about here? Ev asked.
Second, said Chambers. We have a cat in the bag—he nodded affably toward Coleman—and he needs to stay there. Sandy is our eyes and ears in the DEA on this project. He never set foot in Haiti, all right, Ev? Wouldn’t know it from his grandmother’s douche bag.
Yes, sir, he said, and he noticed Coleman’s eyes go slapstick wide as the agent looked past Eville toward the central screen door, its bell jingling as it swung open.
Check out Omar Sharif, Coleman said under his breath.
Burnette stepped aside, disheartened and incredulous, as the Pakistani colonel from Cap-Ha��tien swept onto the porch and made a bee
line for Undersecretary Chambers, chirruping, My most honorable friend Steven, salaam alaikum, what a pleasure! and Eville, floating away from the hallucination of their royal embrace, replete with an exchange of air kissing, wanted to puke his breakfast. Colonel Rashid Khan was dressed all in white, costumed like a paunchy cricketeer, a Raj version of the dashing sportsman, his coal-black hair shellacked with brilliantine and his mustache waxed to a plastic finish, his corporeal presence reeking of astringent cologne and his spiritual presence as foul as a sack of putrefied offal. Whoa, Burnette said to himself, what the fuck, ambushed and beginning to feel paranoid watching this east-meets-west pantomime of a love fest, Chambers leading the colonel by the hand to introduce him to Ben and Sammy, tasteless in their fawning manners and saccharine diplomacy, then the undersecretary directing the Pakistani’s attention to Eville, who saluted as Khan stepped over to acknowledge the American soldier, his expression warm with condescension.
Ev, said the undersecretary, I believe you already know my old friend Colonel Khan, the lion of Peshawar, one of America’s great allies.
Ah, yes, Captain Burnette, said Khan, the supercilious flash of his dark eyes accentuating the pretension of his empire lilt. He twisted his upper body to accept a cup of tea from Ben and turned back with a dry undercurrent of dismissiveness. We have adventures to share as well, wouldn’t you say?
One thing I never understood, Colonel, said Chambers. What possessed you to put on a blue cap and drag yourself halfway around the world to handhold a bunch of spearchuckers? Things get too quiet at home, did they?
Burnette winced at the slur and Chambers turned the colonel away from Eville to introduce him to his African American caddy, Coleman, whose crisp, Good morning, sir, merited only a disinterested nod from the colonel, both viceroys ignoring Coleman to saunter back spikes a-clicking toward the tea service for refills, the Friends of Golf gathered around to be entertained by the explanation of the colonel’s illogical assignment to Haiti. Burnette backed away a humble distance to stand with his fellow coolie, Coleman’s eyes igniting like blowtorches aimed at Khan, muttering out the side of his mouth, You’re the nigger in the picture, asshole. Not me.
Me?! Eville whispered back, stunned.
You? Not you, man. That Paki motherfucker. Agent Coleman paused with a crafty insider’s glance at Burnette and snickered. Well, maybe you too, the way he played you for the fool in Cap-Haïtien.
What would you know about it?
I’d guess you’re about to find out, Captain.
The colonel began his oration, identifying Somalia as the place where the story is born, this new story a wake-up call for modernity itself, the insufferable humiliation that struck his nation like the fangs of an asp, scores of Pakistani blue caps slaughtered by the renegade warlords before the first American Blackhawk ever went down smoking into inglorious history. With Pakistan’s international reputation and honor and the blood of its sons flushed down the toilet of Africa, the colonel had said to himself that not just his country but he, Khan, had rested for far too long on yesterday’s laurels, the blessed triumph over the Soviets in Afghanistan, and, with the time now upon them to be serious men again, he had petitioned his superiors for a transfer, temporary of course, out of Inter-Services Intelligence back into the regular army, with a specific request to command an overseas deployment to give proof to the world, or at least India, that the Pakistani military was a professional institution that could indeed be counted on and must in fact be reckoned with by all. Let Nepal be the joke, the cannon fodder. Let the Bangladeshis, the Salvadorans, the blasted Dutch. But Pakistan, said the colonel. Never again. You must have had a similar response, I imagine. To Mogadishu.
Rashid, my friend, said the undersecretary. That’s a rusty bucket of crap. The way I heard it, you stepped on some toes.
Hah, yes, said the colonel, charming in the immediacy of his surrender to the truth. Only half bullshit. Always the disease of politics, isn’t it? I took the cure.
Chambers looked at his wristwatch and announced, Start time, gentlemen. Eville couldn’t read the undersecretary’s voice one way or the other when Chambers told Colonel Khan that the undisclosed reason they had invited him to Pinehurst was to administer a caning to his Muslim rear end.
In that case, said the colonel with bobble-headed arrogance, accepting the challenge with a glittering look of malice, I propose we play for real stakes. One thousand dollars a hole. He looked to Ben and Sammy for indulgence, mocking his own apostasy. Steven knows, he told them, I am a bad Muslim, willing to gamble with Allah’s blessings.
Too rich for Sammy and Chambers, who declined. Ben thought about it and said, You’re on.
So tell me, Steven, said the colonel, how is our hero Charlie Wilson these days? Do you know, gentlemen, that there is a nifty little course in Peshawar, built by the British in an old lake bed? Tell them, Steven. You’ve played it. What a brilliant foursome, wasn’t it? Zia and Wilson and Steven and myself? And what about you, now that you have conquered all your enemies? Are you awfully bored?
Not so much, said Chambers. Actually, I was thinking you and I might find a way to work together again. Develop projects of mutual interest. Something fun, like interior decorating. Rearrange some furniture. Open up the tight spaces, let in light, that sort of thing.
Oh? the colonel said, and away went his jesting smile, replaced by the guarded expression of a man snared once too often by the too-clever traps of his allies.
Some of your old friends back home have recently decided it’s in their interest to start blowing up American property and personnel. Again. Issuing proclamations. Jihad. Death to infidels, Allahu yoo hoo, the caliphate restored. What have I left out, gentlemen? he asked.
My friends? said the colonel warily, his hubris drained to paler tones. You are mistaken, Steven. I am remembering correctly, yes? that the directorate made you a gift only last year of this airplane chap. That boy.
Yousef. The New York bomber.
Ah, yes, the airplane plotter. Yousef. Operation Bojinka, wasn’t it? This word bojinka—curious, to choose a word from the Balkans. Why do you suppose?
The word is Croatian, said Chambers. A nation overrun with mujos. I was referring to your old friends, across the frontier.
Some of these hooligans were in Mogadishu, you see. They step on Pakistan whenever it suits them. My friends are not outlaw Arabs.
Well, let’s talk about that. I think they mean to improve their game.
Yes, you’re right. We should.
They were slow to get out of the pro shop, the colonel rejecting his first bag of rental clubs, filling a second bag with individually selected woods and irons, inspecting an array of putters as though they were hunting rifles, sighting down the shafts, before choosing one to his satisfaction. Okay, quipped Ben, good-natured in his mild but growing concern for what he had gotten himself into, I can see I have not been sufficiently briefed on the good colonel’s talents.
Rumor has it you were swinging a club down in Haiti, said the undersecretary, and the colonel smiled and confessed to chip shots only onto an improvised practice green, unless of course someone was so insufferably stupid as to stand in his way. Then, chuckled the colonel, I took out the wood.
Eville tried to reconstruct the insights of the morning into a coherent picture of what had happened on the island, glue a frame around what he had long suspected was his unwitting role in events otherwise contrived for a purpose he could not perceive, into which he had been inserted not essentially as a Delta operative—he could see this more clearly now, but as a player working deeper, blacker, so deep and so black he himself wasn’t quite sure what he was doing or why or for whom. The United States Army wasn’t much invested in what went down or festered up in Cap-Haïtien. He was Chambers’s boy after all, sent there for a still opaque reason, a reason ostensibly covered by his big-broth
er assignment with the undersecretary’s gonzo daughter, whom he now had to assume was privy to more than one layer of the deception.
Wake Up and Smell the Latrine Fact Number One, he said to himself—the Pakistani colonel and Steven Chambers were old comrades-in-arms, orchestrating the cash flow and weapons shipments for the mujahideen’s white-hot war out in Central Asia. Fact Number Two—the undersecretary had suggested to the colonel that the time had come to partner up again on the tilting, rubble-strewn dance floor of Fuckistan. Fuckistan! the colonel had guffawed, snorting a laugh through his fat Pashtun nose. Hah, very good, Steven. Okay, Eville said to himself as they moved out to the first tee, what does that mean?
We Pakistanis are a very competitive race, the colonel proclaimed, as though a mountain of data existed to back him up on the goofy chauvinism of this assertion. He chose a driver from the bag held upright by the sullen Coleman, and so began the nine holes of warfare, as practiced hand to hand among the ruling classes, between Kahn and Ben across the piney hillocks of Pinehurst #2, one of the world’s most superior courses, Sammy bragged, and, circa 1898, America’s first golf resort.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 57
