The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  At the bottom of the stairs Holbrooke stepped around and in front of Chambers, turning on him, jabbing a prosecutorial finger at the undersecretary’s chest while Chambers stood there silently, taking it in stride, absorbing this browbeating with a respectful smile of promised compliance, nothing obviously defensive in his genteel veneer. In fact, Burnette thought, he looked the superior being in every respect, the model august statesman, the very embodiment of statesmanship in elegance and temperament, distinguished in his camel-hair topcoat and Savile Row suit, the knotted perfection of his silver necktie reflecting the sculpted crest of platinum hair. There he stood, dignified and composed, his demeanor vibrant with an easy understated presence of command, his visage bronzed with a year-round suntan, professionally handsome, a bit short on the gravitas associated with the word noble but not lacking in the impressions associated with the word aristocrat. And there he stood, in the grip of the choleric envoy, Holbrooke looking rumpled and slightly shabby, an unattended self, thickset and overheated, a boardroom pugilist with his tie loosened and the flaps of his black hair uncombed, displaying the mannerisms of a vulgarian and bully, snarling at Chambers, You’re marching off a cliff with these motherfucking Serbs, when Burnette intervened.

  Sir, he said, stepping forward. Time to go.

  Not the slightest acknowledgment of his protégé, no indication whatsoever of registering Eville’s presence. Chambers simply walked past Burnette with an expressionless gaze to where Scarecrow held open the rear door of the SUV and took his seat. Crow closed the door, obscuring the undersecretary behind the tinted glass. Who’s Burnette? asked the special envoy, prompting Eville out of this stinging moment of invisibility, identifying himself and stepping away with Holbrooke toward the cockpit of the Gulfstream.

  Listen, Burnette, said the envoy, dropping his voice. Major, right?

  Not yet, sir.

  This plane is yours. After the funeral, I want you to put Chambers on it and take him back to the States.

  I don’t expect he’ll want to do that, sir. There’s a luncheon—

  He’s not going. Under any circumstances. Chambers was being detrimental to peace, fighting the administration on Kosovo, bucking against the framework. This man is out of his goddamn mind, the envoy said. He needs medical attention.

  Sir—Eville began to protest but Holbrooke interrupted, taking a cell phone out of his coat pocket, saying a name, a magic word.

  Let’s call Ben. You’ll listen to Ben, right? You think this could happen without Ben’s approval?

  Sir, if the undersecretary resists. I mean—

  Holbrooke seemed amused by the concern. Persuade him, Captain.

  Braying sirens, whipping lights, radio squawk from walkie-talkies, Scarecrow behind the wheel, Tex’s third man, Bill, joining him up front, Eville sliding anxiously into the back with the undersecretary, the special envoy hustled into the SUV behind them, and they were on the move. The motorcade made its way past the terminal and out to the highway and Eville thought for many reasons, This is so fucked, not the least of it the shunning, Chambers sitting erect with indifference, eyes closed, eyes open but blinking at the back of the driver’s skull, Who is it among us who exist for this man? tormenting himself with that, the disavowal, this reinjury and its penance of emotional solitude that seemed to be the lasting consequence of Dottie’s death, this totally in-the-way personal shit. Just trying to cope with the toxicity of it, until out of the corner of his eye he noticed Chambers staring at him, stalled in a genuine effort of memory, and when the undersecretary finally spoke it spooked Burnette. Dottie had voiced concerns and Ben had danced around it and now Holbrooke had been explicit and he had seen for himself peculiar vignettes of erratic behavior, the early warnings were out there but he did not entirely comprehend the undersecretary’s condition, and now Chambers opened his mouth and words came out to carry on a conversation they weren’t having.

  These are days to look forward, Ev, said the undersecretary, an otherwise unctuous sentiment were it not so bizarre. Retain our optimism. I was hoping I’d see you here. Say, did you ever make it down for Christopher’s wedding?

  No, sir, he said, toneless.

  What a shame. I thought you and Dorothy had it all planned out. Meet in Johannesburg, drive up to Harare, spend a few days exploring Kruger on the way. Fantastic.

  Yes, sir, he said. That was our plan.

  Fantastic, said Chambers, how was it?

  How was what, sir?

  I couldn’t get there, you know. His mother went. Ah, that reminds me, Chambers continued but stopped, a fleeting panic in his eyes until the thought came skipping back and he reached across the seat, his fingers alighting on Burnette’s knee and then springing away like startled birds, Burnette reeling at the sight of the unclipped index and middle fingernails on Chambers’s right hand, their extraordinary womanish length, like a Chinese emperor’s. There’s something I must show you. Something of great importance. Don’t let me forget, Ev.

  Yes, sir.

  Later, said Chambers, oddly relieved, it appeared, of an unspoken burden. Remind me.

  His attention shifted, filling with delight, to the city and for ten minutes he talked nonstop, pointing out landmarks, sites that had been shelled in the latest conflict, attaching vivid anecdotes to buildings and neighborhoods and monuments, at one point leaning forward to tap Scarecrow on the shoulder, mistaking him for a national, addressing him in Croatian, Crow telling him, I don’t speak that, sir, Burnette confronted with yet another riddle that slowly turned to revelation—apparently the undersecretary had spent some part of his childhood in Zagreb during World War Two.

  Then Chambers’s mood evanesced and he fell silent for a few moments and his gaze turned dreamy. You’ve been to Brussels, right? he said finally to no one in particular. Best moules on the planet.

  Another extended pause and then a pronouncement, his voice enthusiastic, tallyho, as if the answer to a trivia question had popped into his head.

  Maintain your convictions!

  Yes, sir.

  Ev, that man is an asshole.

  Okay.

  That’s not the problem, you see. The problem is he’s a mujo-lover. No good will come of it.

  They were slowing down behind a processional line of vehicles as they approached the main entrance to the presidential palace. Burnette commo-checked his team’s wiring, the cuff mics and earbuds, and began to rehearse the in-and-out details and timing, not solely for the undersecretary’s benefit—Bill, the add-on to their detail from State, needed to hear it; straight routine for Scarecrow and Burn, this was SOP—but it brought a fiery irrational rebuke from Steven Chambers.

  I know what to do, goddamn it, he said and Burnette stared at him in cold wonder. Goddamn it, Ev. After all these years.

  His voice trailed, something new flooding into his blue eyes, unprecedented in the crossed connection of their relationship, at least to Burnette, Chambers showing what he made a point of never showing. Brokenness, pain.

  You don’t understand, said Chambers. I’m here again to bury my father.

  The pager on Burnette’s belt jiggled as they passed through the palatial gates, the undersecretary defying Eville, lowering his window to wave at a mournful crowd roped behind the cordon of police and soldiers, the people animated by their glimpse of Chambers, burbling with reverent noise—it would be wrong to call it cheering—for a native son’s return. Up through the evergreened knolls to the esplanade of paving stones, its red carpet and ceremonial guard, at the front of the motorcade now, Scarecrow placing the transmission in park, Vasich’s valet opening the undersecretary’s door. Eville glanced at the screen of his upgraded model as he exited the vehicle to lope to the undersecretary’s side, hitting the wrong keys until he hit the right one, reading the text message from Ben, Green light. Bring Arnie home. />
  He remembered—Yeah, Arnie, right. Call me Arnie.

  What’s he got? Scarecrow had asked the other day. That Alzheimers crud? The neurological term was multi-infarcted dementia, diminishing mental capacity signaled by intermittent cognitive blips and ruts due to a years-long series of tiny aneurysms, micro-explosions in the brain, too minuscule to be consciously experienced by the person being rerouted toward an impending abyss.

  Arnie, strokes, Christ. It was too much. Christ’s chosen one, handpicked by the Lord to serve as the supreme allied commander for Armageddon, going eighteen holes with the devil and a play-off round of sudden death. Says Lucifer, How many strokes you giving me, Arnie? Zap, zap. Keep ’em coming, my boy.

  Inside the unheated glassed expanse of the palace, in a pale reception hall dim with dispirited light seeping through the plates of floor-to-ceiling windows, the air redolent with the viscid smell of Easter lilies, the receiving line looked to Burnette’s uncongenial eye like a tenth reunion of the politburo. Severe jowly ministers in fedoras and felt overcoats that hung off their frames like Mongolian yurts; the high command of pigeon-breasted generals in uniforms of a cheap-looking green, plastered with medals and Croix de Guerre and campaign ribbons, their faces shadowed beneath large caps with peaked crowns; foreign dignitaries from across the Euro-zone and Eastern bloc who in their collective countenance openly displayed the belief that greatness could not accrue without a heavy investment in pomposity; the preening criminals subcontracted to nail a shell of drywall over the wreckage of Yugoslavia. Burnette walked a pace back, at the undersecretary’s side along the long row of powerful men, acutely aware of his own unesteemed status. He had accepted his place in the order of the world long ago but something about today, in the presence of this critical mass of assembled pharaohs, rankled Burnette so that he had to remind himself that what he one day might give his life for was both more abstract yet more real than men such as these, men who killed and conquered but more pervasively corrupted, degrading the value of the blood they had spilled.

  They had come to Vasich, the undersecretary and the general embracing, exchanging a double kiss, Vasich’s shining eyes meeting Burnette’s with a warning, his chin gesturing toward a high-ranking Canadian blue cap who a minute later asked to speak with Burnette and he looked to the end of the line and made a guess. I can give you thirty seconds, he said, motioning for Bill to assume his place, and stepped aside with the UN officer, affiliated he said with the peacekeeping mission’s legal office, who confided, Heads up. There are some fellows from The Hague in town. I wouldn’t like to see anything ugly happen. What is it exactly that can happen? asked Burnette. For instance, said the officer, there’s some talk about the tribunal’s subpoena power. Can’t happen, said Burnette. No jurisdiction. Diplomatic immunity. American. Untouchable. Tell them not to waste their time.

  There’s a hitch, said the Canadian as Burnette began to slide away to rejoin his detail. It seems your undersecretary has dual citizenship. Honorary, of course, but I understand there’s some legitimacy to it that could be tested.

  Not on my watch, said Burnette.

  He returned to position, Bill resumed his tail, the line ended and the moment arrived for the undersecretary to pay his last respects to the republic’s hero, beloved architect of freedom and democracy, the former partisan Davor Starevica. Burnette and Crow remained where they were as the undersecretary took three steps forward to the raised open casket, flanked by the striped flags of sovereignty, red-white-blue, emblazoned with the republic’s checkerboard coat of arms, a matched set of rock-faced soldiers as honor guard, Chambers peering inside the coffin with an incongruous pleasant smile, the dead man a disfigured gnomish fossil being buried in the bag of his uniform, four stars upon each shoulder board. Chambers bent in to press a kiss upon the corpse’s opalescent forehead, reached into his own inner pocket, then wrapped an ivory-beaded rosary around the lifelong atheist’s unpliable skeleton hands. The undersecretary looked daftly beatific, stepping back, straightening his spine, saluting and tottering away to become part of the line himself until the last dignitary had filed past and the casket was closed and flag-draped, lifted by the pallbearers and carried out to the hearse for its farewell journey through the drizzle of the city’s sorrow.

  The cortege was stop-and-go, the streets lined with solemn spectators. In the twenty minutes it took to arrive at the cathedral’s gargantuan compound on the Kaptol hill—the southern Kremlin, some called the former archbishop’s palace—Chambers, with eerie serenity, had occupied himself with a second rosary, fingers pinching along the beads, lips moving, an occasional phrase of Latin escaping into silence. Otherwise, he didn’t say a word and his withdrawal began to bug Eville, the silence like a door left open for his thoughts to wander out where they didn’t belong, nosing around in rubbish piles of melancholy and rage, here he was at a fucking funeral with the undersecretary and where the fuck was his daughter, his daughter’s funeral? The son of a bitch never had the decency to let him know and he wanted to ask but wouldn’t. Fuck him. Fucker.

  Scarecrow nodded to a voice in his earbud and said into his collar mic, Roger that, and reported to his passengers, Three minutes out. Crowd estimate five-point-five-k. Then he glanced over his shoulder and said, Burn, you copied that, right? They have facial recognition on your guy, and Eville said, Yeah, I heard. Tan corduroy sports coat, black crewneck sweater, left side, press area. I’m going to step away and let Bill come forward with you. What do you think?

  Don’t get lost, dude.

  Bill, you okay with that?

  Sure, said Bill. What do I need to know?

  Cockblock, said Scarecrow. Some pest.

  We should be okay, said Burnette.

  Then they were ascending the hill and Chambers perked up, kissed the rosary’s crucifix and tucked it back into his pocket and returned to the nostalgia of here and now. These walls, he said, shaking his horny index finger at the ancient crumbling fortifications outside the windows on Eville’s side, these walls were constructed to protect the cathedral when the Ottomans invaded at the end of the fifteenth century. You get my point. I walked here many times with my mother.

  At the top of the hill they inched along as the limousines ahead of them dropped off passengers at the plaza beneath the cathedral’s soaring Gothic spires, the crowd split in the middle by a wide channel of metal barricades like bike racks, lined with heavily armed police facing the people and two parallel rows of soldiers facing one other, standing at attention in their dress uniforms with shouldered rifles, and the towering cathedral rising like a sheer solitary Alp at the far end of this temporary avenue, its entrance somehow forbidding and ominous, an open black mouth. The undersecretary told a story about the former archbishop buried now under the cathedral’s flagstones. Stepinac, he said, my father’s cousin. Burnette half-listened, readying himself for their infil, Tilly’s voice in his ear saying, You’re scoped, Burn. The story was something about a tea biscuit, something about refugees.

  Then the doors were open and they were out in the moist bone-aching air and organized into the procession behind the president and his cabinet and generals, the undersecretary flanked by Crow and Bill, Burnette a few steps behind, his head on a swivel, scanning the ranks of Zagreb’s citizenry, Tex and Tex’s detail and the special envoy behind him and behind them the ambassador and the rest of the American delegation and behind them a divided world.

  From within the mass of bodies Burnette heard muted applause and lamentation, an occasional outburst of bellicose emotion, patriotic slogans or cursing—he couldn’t tell. His vision swept past a grandmother weeping, small rose-cheeked children riding their fathers’ shoulders, grizzled old veterans in partisan garb, young bucks in black leather jackets, decommissioned paramilitaries in camo, chic young women not inclined toward despondence. About twenty meters from the entrance Tilly was in his ear again, saying your guy’s o
n the left, five meters up, and Burnette spotted Tom Harrington and radioed back to say once he had the undersecretary inside he was turning around. Which is what he did, turning and just walking straight back to where the unsuspecting Harrington stood in the media pack behind the cordon next to a woman with a clipboard speaking to a cameraman and he walked past them a ways to a cop and flashed his ID and cracked open enough space between two sections of barricades to squeeze through and with as much politeness as he could manage muscled his way through and tapped him on the shoulder saying, Tom.

  Tom, can I speak to you for a minute?

  Yeah, what is it? said Harrington, his upper body twisting around until he could see who was talking and what he saw drained the color from his face although it was apparent to Burnette that Tom did not recognize him, a stranger behind the beard and sunglasses and dressed up like some bad-ass prince. What’s this about? asked Harrington, his face wary, struggling for an answer that seemed just out of reach, behind a veil.