Funny thing. Going to a funeral carrying a briefcase.
What business is that of yours?
Will you come with me for a minute?
Why would I do that?
I don’t know, said Burnette, pushing up the Oakleys to rest on his brow, squinting. For old time’s sake, maybe.
Holy shit, said Tom.
Holy shit, Tom. Long time no see. I take it you’re a friend of the deceased?
Did I see this right? Was that you bringing in Chambers? I mean, it’s hard to distinguish one heavy from another. But what else would you be doing here?
Let’s get out of this crowd for a minute.
Hell yes, Top. There’s some questions I’ve wanted to ask you, man.
Me first, said Eville, but when they found themselves at the rear of the crowd and stopped in a newborn patch of sunlight, Harrington beat him to the draw.
All right, Ev, goddamn it, you tell me something.
Wait a minute.
I want to know who’s buried out there in the Mirogoj cemetery.
What?
Right next to the grave for the bastard they’re putting in the ground today.
I’m not following this, said Burnette.
The marker says Dorothy Kovacevic. It’s right between this new hole for Starevica and a marker that reads Marija Kovacevic. That’s Chambers’s mother. He excavated her coffin from a churchyard in Pittsburgh and buried her here in 1995, after Operation Storm. Ever heard of that? The final assault? Ethnic cleansing? Have you talked about that with the undersecretary’s buddies? The generals inside the cathedral.
Wait a minute, said Ev, flustered. Hold on.
One day these guys are going to end up at The Hague. You know that, don’t you?
We’ll discuss that in a second. What’s this you’re saying about Dorothy Kovacevic?
You tell me, Top. When I first came here last August—the fifteenth? sixteenth?—I was told by my minders, oh, too bad, you just missed Kovacevic, he came to bury his daughter in Mirogoj but now he’s gone.
What? said Burnette. Wait a minute. Slow down.
So look, come clean with me. Who’s in that grave? I’m thinking nobody. I’m thinking someone besides me was poking around and came too close and suddenly there was a necessity for a gravesite. Somebody like Jack Parmentier.
I don’t know anything about this, said Burnette.
I hope whatever she was doing for the government was worth the cost of hooking up with a scumbag like Parmentier.
Tom. Look.
And who do you work for these days, man?
I can’t talk about that.
Okay, said Tom. Let’s talk about Jackie. Let’s talk about Renee. Let’s talk about Dottie, Dorothy. She’s alive, right?
I can’t confirm that.
Harrington mentioned discrepancies and Burnette mentioned due diligence and they stared at one another until Tom shook his head, visibly saddened.
You’re in Croatia with her goddamn father. What do you think we’re talking about here? I’m talking about a human being, a woman, someone I knew, okay. And I’m talking about Haiti, someone’s life. I’m not asking for the Agency’s jewels. I really don’t give a flying fuck what the game was.
All right, look, said Burnette. She’s not.
Not what?
Alive.
I don’t believe you, said Harrington.
Okay, all right. Have it your way.
Eville, we were friends. And Gerard was my friend. How did you get Gerard to lie to me?
I didn’t, Tom. Maybe she did.
You know what I do. You know I’m an investigator. You know I was brought in on the case.
No, I didn’t know that.
How about we dispense with bullshit, Top. Then one day I think I see the priest, St. Jean, in Miami, Little Haiti, and I’m right, it’s him, because it takes me a while but I finally track him down, and guess what he tells me, some wild fucking story about voodoo hijinks and Jackie faking her death.
Whatever you say.
Here’s what I say, Ev. I want you to do the right thing. I want you to sign an affidavit attesting to the fact she’s alive.
I can’t do that.
Top, there’s an innocent kid in a prison in Haiti indicted for her murder. He’ll rot away if we don’t do anything about it.
I didn’t put him there, said Burnette with cold fury. You did.
Tom slumped and bowed his head in remorse and looked up with plaintive eyes. You’re right, he said. I did. What the fuck, Ev. I don’t know what this is all about but help me out here.
Burnette said he had to get back and Tom said he had something to pass along to the undersecretary and Burnette snapped out of his numb drift toward wherever this news about Dottie’s grave was taking him, remembering his purpose here, the original deflection, was to confront Tom. Tom began to unlock the clasps on his briefcase and Eville asked him to stop and told him why.
What are you talking about? said Harrington, his lips tightening into a smile and when Burnette finished explaining his understanding of the situation, Harrington released an involuntary snort of laughter for which he quickly apologized, calling the notion of entrapping Steven Chambers a judicial fantasy. The tribunal doesn’t have the authority to subpoena an American diplomat, said Harrington. Man, I’d love to depose Chambers, the guy was like an enabler, a facilitator, the empire’s designated winker. He knows every bloody thing that happened here, he was a witness to the decision-making process responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law. In other words, war crimes. He can talk with us if he wants, but I don’t see that happening, do you? Anyway, Top, Harrington said as he opened the briefcase and removed a manila envelope, will you pass this along to Chambers, Kovacevic, whatever name he uses. I imagine he’ll appreciate it.
He attempted to hand the envelope to Burnette, who wouldn’t accept it so readily. What’s in it? Burnette said.
Something of Jackie’s. Here, take it, come on. Look inside if you don’t trust me, he said shrewdly while Burnette’s suspicious fingers worked to unseal the flap. If you would give that to her father. Or, you know, return it to Jackie if you happen to bump into her.
What Burnette intended as a cursory glance into the envelope’s mouth became a hopeless stare at the triple strands of Dottie’s Turkish bracelet, its blue-eyed insistence against evil, and he stood riveted and speechless, finally nudging his sunglasses down over his eyes to leave only the quiver of his jaw exposed, his emotions contorted by knife-stabs of gratitude penetrating a sense of powerlessness and defeat, the fresh tearing away of the unexpected chance with Dottie, the entire affair the most provisional, unreliable arrangement but the chance had been there nevertheless, tangible and true and lost, and telling himself he had been wrong to want it hadn’t gotten him very far. Here was her bracelet; for him, that was its message.
God, I’m sorry, Ev, but—Tom said, unable to complete the thought. She’s really dead, isn’t she?
He paused to collect himself in the narthex, cajole and kick himself into the psychic transition away from the sudden great weariness he felt, leaning back against a wall and closing his eyes for a moment, walking down the storm-swept beach hand in hand with Dottie, his hands about their own quick business here in Zagreb, transferring the bracelet to his trouser pocket, holding it as his palm turned sweaty around its glass beads, tossing the envelope into a waste basket. He heard the voice, faraway but amplified, of eulogy. Then the ear voice of Crow saying Burn, where are you? Steve-o on the move. Where’s he going? Burnette asked. Where are you? The whatchacallit, the pulpit, said Crow. It’s like halftime. Looks like he’s going to speak. Roger that, said Burnette. Where are you? and Scarecrow told him he was i
n the aisle on the right side of the altar and Eville said he was coming.
Vasich’s security men fixed him with hard looks as he stepped into the pillared cavern of the nave. He removed his sunglasses while his clearance was double-checked and he noticed the woman from behind the press cordon who had stood with her clipboard between Tom and the cameraman, arguing in hushed tones with one of Vasich’s people. He couldn’t see the undersecretary but his voice began to echo from within the slanted light at the far end of the nave, and he went over and requisitioned the woman, whispering to the guard, She’s with me. Why? she whispered back, recoiling nervously. He asked her if she spoke English and she said yes. Croatian? Yes. She looked at him more closely, with suspicion, and said, Where is Tom? and he told her Tom was outside, Tom was fine, and he asked her to do him a favor. Will you translate for me? Translate what? The man who’s speaking. Kovacevic? she said. Please, said Burnette, I want to know what he’s saying. Ah, said the woman, I see. Yes, I will help you if you will help me. I’ll try, said Burnette. That’s all I can promise.
They moved quietly to the right, to the top of the side aisle, slowly making their way toward the front of the hall, the woman whispering in his ear, He is talking about when he was a child, meeting Starevica when he was a boy, how Starevica was a second father. He says his own father was killed in the world war. Burnette’s eyes wandered over the congregation packed into the rows of pews, his vision floating upward into the cold vastness of sacred space, feeling an uneasy awe. Now Kovacevic is talking about our war. He says our divine struggle, on heaven’s behalf. He is saying some good things about our army and our leaders and about Starevica. Patriotic things. The thin scent of frankincense began to mix with the pungency of garlic on the woman’s breath and the stony breath of the cathedral, itself a source of an unfathomable oppression bearing down on him, an intersection of vanities and ingenuity and aspirations meant, he understood this, to signify mankind’s relationship with the cosmos, but the cathedral’s power was immodest, its inspiration a wash between faith and fear, more fissure than connection, more arrogance than humility, or so he felt. Halfway down the aisle, she paused, her brow wrinkling as she listened, and he waited for her to proceed and she was whispering again as they tiptoed ahead. Now he is saying strong things. Kovacevic says history will never forgive us if we stop now. God Almighty will never forgive us. He had stood on glacial moraines before, staring at ice fields cracking with a deep interior fracturing sound, hearing the stress of the planet, and he had staggered to the top of inhospitable wind-blasted summits only to experience this same sense of human insignificance. He is making recrimination against the Muslims. We must not allow the Turks to pass through this door, a door, of atrocity that has been thrown open by Satan. Like you, Kovacevic says, I want peace in the world and I will fight for it and for Christ. He had not lived the type of life that offered a familiarity with cathedrals, the soaring majesty that was not barrenness but the abstract made amazingly concrete and the sacred made sarcophagal, a bell jar containing a millennium’s worth of anguished spirits. He is making provocations. He says when the mujos tell us they will drink our blood we will sew their mouths closed with barbed wire. Burnette thought maybe it was his upbringing, a boy from a ranch in Montana unaccustomed to the monumental grandeur of mankind’s achievements, his unworldliness never a liability on any mission but here he felt it as a flaw, a complication to his sense of reverence.
Oh, she gasped, stunned, my God, clasping a hand over her mouth in horror. Burnette already felt something tipping out of balance, the increasing volume of troubled noise jumping through the congregation, divided into camps of approval and disapproval, eddies of mortification, spouts of wanton encouragement.
What’s he saying?
He is speaking improperly, she said.
What did he say?
It’s not proper, she said. His language is bad. He is using a word that for you is fack? Fuck? Kovacevic says the Turks killed his father and chopped his head and killed his aunt and fucked his mother and fucked his daughter and, oh, my God—
There was Scarecrow and Bill and he could see Chambers in the pulpit and he told the woman to wait here and Crow asked, What’s happening? and Burnette walked out onto the tiles between the front pews and the altar steps. I’m getting him down, he said, but Vasich seemed to have the same idea, rising from the first pew on the far side of the center aisle and calmly mounting the altar toward the undersecretary’s perch, murmuring sympathetically, words Burnette could not hear or understand, the honest sound of respect itself the meaning. A tense hush spread through the cathedral. Chambers fell silent and his face lit up with angelic benevolence as he observed the general’s approach, each man beckoning the other to come, and then Vasich was beside him in the pulpit, gently taking Chambers’s arm.
Then Steven Chambers was singing most gloriously and Vasich seemed taken aback for a moment but he turned to stand with his hand over his heart and sing, too, joined a few notes later by the choir, and then it seemed everyone in the archbishop’s cathedral was singing, Burnette slowly retreating toward the woman, staggered by the transcendent vibrations of so many lungs exhaling such a rumble of harmony, this newborn nation of voices, the spectacular power of humanity’s chorus not so much rising up toward the heavens as inducing heaven to lose altitude, shimmer on the roof beams, transforming the cathedral for Burnette into a space he saw and felt for the first time as a place of earthbound beauty.
My God, the woman whispered into his ear, your Kovacevic saved himself. He is singing the anthem. The name is called “Our Beautiful Homeland.”
Then the song was finished, Vasich again took the undersecretary’s arm and escorted him back to his pew, the priests rose from their thrones at the rear of the chancel, the altar boys rang their bells, and the Mass for the Dead resumed.
At the burial of Davor Starevica in Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery, the ghosts out and about, Eville Burnette walked at Steven Chambers’s side past the Wall of Pain to gather with the crowd at the foot of the open grave, the crush of mourners obscuring the adjacent plots. Since leaving the cathedral Chambers had seemed enervated, his eyes clotted with confusion, then glittering with unspent tears. At the arcaded entryway into Mirogoj, Burnette had summoned whatever courage or stupidity it took to remind Chambers of what the undersecretary had mentioned earlier in the day, something he wanted Ev to see, but the reminder mystified Chambers.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, he said, and Burnette didn’t press the matter because he could hardly believe himself Tom Harrington’s claim, wondering if he would find Dottie here or not, if he wanted to, or if he could survive not finding her, or survive that moment of discovery if in fact he found her. And hadn’t she, after all, made a habit out of dying, forfeiting her credibility as a mortal? She had.
Who died in Landstuhl? He had held her hand.
Who died in Haiti? He had lifted her up.
The president of the republic stepped forward, digging his right hand into the black pyramid of his native soil to pitch its crumbs into the hole, the arm of an attendant poking through the encirclement offering a white handkerchief, which the president used and passed along to Steven Kovacevic to clean the dirt from his own hands. Stepping away, Eville confided into his mic. Two minutes, he whispered, listening to Scarecrow and Bill affirm the transmission.
He went to find her grave and it was right there and it demolished him. There too her grandmother’s, people standing on them, the turf muddied by their shoes, and he said to himself, Are you here? thinking what use was memory when everything about the journey ahead was unknown, and death bestowed as a homecoming, the end of homelessness, and a family restored to a thing it had lost when it was no longer young, which was togetherness. Hey, he said and squatted before the stone and traced her name with trembling fingers and kissed the stone, reading the inscription, The soul is a field in the heart of
man.
Hey, I found you, but I have to go.
Scarecrow was talking in his ear, reporting the ceremony’s conclusion, asking him how he wanted to handle this and he found Vasich and let him know the change in plans and Vasich said he understood. It’s for the best, I think, he said, and went to arrange an escort to the airport and Eville hooked back up with the undersecretary and his detail and there was the woman with her clipboard and her cameraman and Tom hovering in the background. You promised, she said and Eville said I know, but I can’t let you ask him about politics, is it a deal?
What can I ask?
Ask about his childhood or something, he said, and stepped around her to speak to Harrington who once again beat him to the draw.
You saw the grave?
Yeah. Thanks.
How did she die?
I thought you were an investigator, Tom. I expect you’ll get to the bottom of it.
Help me get that kid out of jail.
I don’t know if I can but I’ll check it out, he said and looked back over his shoulder at the ITN crew and the undersecretary and told Tom they had to cut the interview short and leave and walked back over to the visibly frustrated woman and said, Okay?
He’s not well, she said. He only wants to know when he’s going to lunch. He says he’s hungry.
BurnOne, he heard Crow say into his earpiece, our boy’s walking.
Copy that, said Burnette, his eyes following the undersecretary into the crowd, Chambers headed toward a smoky kiosk out by the entrance selling kebabs. He’s not going anywhere, he told Crow, and he slowly followed Dottie’s father, who was trying to pay for a skewer of meat with a hundred dollar bill.
Then Chambers seemed possessed, his mouth full of lamb, chewing and talking maniacally about the embassy, the embassy wasn’t an intelligence failure, you know, we warned them again and again, he had no information she was going through Nairobi to spend a few days with Mary Beth before the wedding in Zimbabwe, go out to Mombasa, you know, lay on the beach, I suppose, she never told me a fucking thing about that, said Chambers, the tears finally coming. They dug out the two of them side by side in Mary Beth’s office, did you know that? She wasn’t there a minute before the bombs went off and the blast, the glass, the glass flying into her eyes. Did you know that, Ev? Did you see the reports?
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 79
