by Bill Granger
At five minutes after midnight, with nearly half the guests gone, the president of St. Michel and his sister appeared at the door that led from their private quarters. Colonel Ready had stopped once to explain to Rita that they were always late to their own parties; it was a calculated gesture, even as it was rude. Claude-Eduard thought it was sophisticated.
As they entered the room, the tired musicians perked up. The pianist mopped his brow and then began at fast waltz tempo “Begin the Beguine.”
The president was very thin and tall. He seemed a nervous man with a long nose and watery blue eyes. His listless brown hair was combed straight back from his square forehead. His ears were long. He wore white tie and tails and a medal given to him on the day he decided to become President for Life of the Republic.
His sister, Yvette, held his arm as they circled the room. She was fitted in a tight green dress that reached to her ankles. Her eyes were black and glittered with fierce energy, a dark contrast to her brother, whose features were indistinct. Rita was reminded of a hand-tinted photograph before the era of color pictures. That was it, she thought: They were out of time. Everything in this room was out of time.
Colonel Ready was suddenly at her side again as she stared, entranced, at the strange, glittering couple walking slowly around the room, stopping now and then to speak to this consul or that.
“They were orphans—”
“I read a little about them before I came here. About the island,” she said and felt again the threat coiled in Ready’s presence next to her.
“The last children of the colonialists. I think they believe this is still a colony. The president makes up to the French consul… do you see?”
She stared and did not look at Ready next to her.
“Yvette is the one with ambition. You can see it in the way she holds herself. A pretty enough package,” Ready said, grinning, trying to distract Rita enough to look at him.
“Yvette is the reason Claude-Eduard stays where he is,” said Colonel Ready.
“I thought you were, colonel.”
“Well, I help.”
“You have the army. You have the black police.”
“You are informed.”
“I wanted to be informed before coming to the enemy as a hostage.”
“A guest, Miss Macklin. ‘A hostage’ implies a threat. There is no threat.”
And Rita, no longer tired, remembered where she was and why. “I wish he had killed you.”
“It would not have been enough. He would have killed me in Evian if that would have ended it. His trouble is that he thinks too clearly. It was always his trouble. You can’t calculate every step you take with an eye on the outcome.”
Rita turned to him finally and saw the hungry, appraising look in his eyes.
“But you would have been dead,” she said with a dull voice.
“And November would have been made alive,” he replied. “And his girl. And if CIA knew it, then KGB would know it and some mechanism would snap in place in some third-level bureaucracy inside the Fourth Directorate and the wet contract would be issued again. This time, perhaps, to include you.”
“There was no contract.”
“There is no other reason to explain Devereaux’s ‘death’ and his reluctance to be reborn.”
“What if he doesn’t come?”
For a moment, a flicker of uncertainty crossed Ready’s face but it was soon gone.
“You’re here.”
“A guest, you said. I covered my tracks as well. I have three assignments from magazines here. Including my friends in Washington. They know I’m here, they know I’m at the Ritz. They know about you.”
His face reddened a moment and then he grinned. “You are careful, Miss Macklin, but I assure you, no harm will come to you. When you write of St. Michel, I hope you will be brutally honest—but kind to us as well. We are a struggling people in the Caribbean basin, the impoverished of Paradise.”
“How eloquent.”
“Take Yvette, the president’s sister. She is beloved of the blacks on the island. They think she is one of them. She makes cause with them and sympathizes with their poverty.”
“She dresses like it.”
“The people tolerate Claude-Eduard. But she understands power.”
“She brought you here.”
“Many elements… brought me here.”
“You still work for Langley.”
“No. I assure you of that. I’m retired.”
“Honorably?”
“With a check every month from Uncle,” he said. “Yvette brought Celezon into government—before I came. Celezon is useful to me. He has his own connections. There are rumors, always rumors, about Yvette, about the magic in the hills, about the voodoo—”
“Oh, come on,” she said.
“Brother and sister. Neither ever married. Some say they are lovers, that she has had a child by him…” He was smiling, talking in the same strange way that infected everyone on this island of half-truths, unfulfilled promises, endless tomorrows.
“Try that booga-booga stuff on someone else.”
“Our people,” Ready said. “The people of St. Michel. They live on rumors and scrawny chickens and the voodoo. Up in the hills, I mean.”
“Where the rebels are.”
Ready’s grin was full of contempt. “Sometimes I just pity Manet, I honest to God pity the bastard, living up in the hills with his freedom fighters drawn from the ranks of that rabble, trying to foment a disciplined revolution with the likes of them.”
“Manet has managed to elude you, though.”
“Do you think so, Rita?”
And she realized again how she hated this man and had wanted to kill him that night in Evian because the cruelty in his manner raked her as casually as it raked Devereaux.
“The trouble with having ambition in a country without ambition is that you have to have enemies,” Colonel Ready said.
She stared at him but he had turned.
“Look at Yvette. A magnificent woman. She should have gone to France with that ambition, not stayed here.”
“Are you in love with her?”
Ready said, “What an odd thought.”
But then the president was very close and his sister still held his arm and Colonel Ready was smiling at them. Rita Macklin looked in the president’s watery eyes and saw a hunger that made her ill. She nearly flinched as the president smiled at her. She felt Colonel Ready’s hand on her bare arm.
“Mon président,” began Colonel Ready. “This is Rita Macklin, the American reporter I spoke of—”
“So?” He smiled like a cat licking milk. He inclined his head slightly as though expecting Rita to curtsy.
“And Mademoiselle Yvette Pascon, sister of the president.”
“I’m happy to meet—”
“Colonel Ready, what an extraordinary man you are. You have promised to bring the world’s journalists to St. Michel to record our celebration and you have done so. There are television cameras and reporters. And now, this journalist. She is not only an honor to St. Michel, but to your good taste, colonel. Mademoiselle, forgive me, but you are quite beautiful. Is she not so, Yvette?”
Yvette smiled. “As you say, my dear brother.”
Rita felt her color rising.
“I must insist on giving you an interview, mademoiselle,” Claude-Eduard continued. “A private and an exclusive interview, we two alone—”
“Mon président, another time, I will arrange it,” said Colonel Ready, gripping Rita’s arm. “She is too tired—she jetted in this afternoon from Switzerland.”
“Why were you in Switzerland, dear one?”
“An assignment,” she began again. She felt a little embarrassed, even ashamed. The president was so close to her that his body nearly touched her body. Damn it, she thought, it’s not my fault. His breath smelled of sour milk.
She realized suddenly that he was wearing perfume of a strange, sweet scent that might have come
from exotic oils. His limp hair shone beneath the chandeliers as though coated with a thin oil.
She felt nauseated.
Colonel Ready said, “Mon président, Miss Macklin wanted to see you but she just told me she is feeling unwell. Would you forgive us if I took her back to the Ritz?”
“Colonel, mademoiselle: Permit me. If you are ill, I will have my physician attend you. We have a bedroom at the palace, many bedrooms—”
“No.” The voice was sharp, certain of command. “Can’t you see she is really tired, brother?”
Rita felt naked as they all looked at her.
And then Yvette turned to Colonel Ready and said, “Take her back to the hotel, colonel.”
“Yes, mademoiselle.”
“Claude, we have many other guests to attend to,” she said. “The hour is late. The American consul has gone.”
And then the president did a strange thing. He turned to his sister and his eyes seemed to glaze as though he were falling into a trance; his face was formed into the face of another person. “Who made us late?” The words were bitchy, uttered in a flat near-falsetto and Rita felt very frightened.
Outside the palace a few minutes later, in the still, humid air, she shivered. Colonel Ready understood. He took her arm again.
“They are frightening—”
“They should frighten you. Mon président wants you, I’m afraid.” There was annoyance in his voice. “It’s too bad. A complication.”
“You knew this would happen.”
“No. I can’t predict the future. I don’t anticipate the consequences; I act. I leave that for your friend.”
“It would have been better to kill you.”
“Yes,” Ready said. “It would have been better for both of you. But that’s too late now. He will fly in on the day after tomorrow and while we celebrate the anniversary of the republic, he will do what I asked him to do.”
“You could have gotten anyone—”
“I wanted him.”
“Why?”
Colonel Ready said nothing for a moment as he walked with her down the steps to the Rue Sans Souci that would lead back to the hotel. The city was dark and there were restless sounds in the darkness from those who did not sleep. They could hear radios playing and there was the sound of a guitar and the mournful voice of a very bad singer.
“Because I had to have him,” Colonel Ready said.
“That’s a threat.”
“No. I never threaten. Only say what I will do.”
“Then you’re going to expose him in any case.”
“Perhaps,” Colonel Ready said.
She was very afraid in the darkness. She could barely see the outline of the wrought-iron gate that led up the stairs to the Palais Gris. There were sentries on the street. She saw their teeth form a grin, lit from the lights of the palace. Her knees began to buckle under her own weight. Colonel Ready held her arms and she could not move away from him.
“This is a nightmare,” she said. She could barely stand up.
“No, Rita. It is much worse than that. Much, much worse,” Colonel Ready said and his scar was white and as menacing as a knife across his face. And he leaned close to her and pulled her toward him. She felt his lips upon her lips and she felt her feet slip out from under her. The nightmare was upon her.
9
THE ROAD TO MADELEINE
They kept all the syringes and the needles in a sealed plastic box on the floor of the Jeep. The Jeep growled into a lower gear and the wheels grabbed at the slippery road that ran up the mountain. Beyond this last hill was Madeleine, the second city of St. Michel, tucked at the southern point of the crescent-moon-shaped island. Everyone on St. Michel believed the rebels owned Madeleine, even if there were some government troops billeted there.
“Why do we need to meet with a man like that?” Sister Agnes Kozowski had asked in St. Michel town, before the journey. She always asked the obvious questions.
“Because the mission is in the mountains again. And he has control of the hills.”
“They aren’t real mountains. Not like in Colorado.”
“As you’ve told us many times.” Sister Mary Columbo gave Agnes short shrift because Agnes, for all her generosities, had a sometimes whining nature. She had acquired it as an only child in a rich family.
The third nun in the Jeep, dressed like the others in simple khaki trousers and a cotton blouse, was Sister Mary St. John of God. She was the oldest of the three women but was not the leader. Sister Mary Columbo thought that she was probably a saint.
Sister Mary Columbo was sure that sainthood was not very close to her. She had been a nurse and skilled field medic in Vietnam. She had worked with a MASH unit in Vietnam more than fifteen years before. She was forty but she felt so old and despairing at times that she prayed herself awake all night. She was a practical woman. Sometimes, it frightened her to think that everything she did in the world did not matter.
Sister Agnes, on the other hand, knew she was making a difference by her actions and that she was saving lives. Which is why Sister Agnes was impatient about making the trip down the coast from St. Michel town to Madeleine to seek out permission from the rebels to cross into the hills that followed the line of the island on the windward side above the coastal road.
The nuns had medical supplies: penicillin and vaccines against scarlet fever and whooping cough—both diseases currently prevalent on the island among the children—and polio vaccines. There had been a polio epidemic in the hills the previous summer and more than a hundred children had died and many more had been crippled.
There were also books that contained prayers and stories. There were many rosaries as well because the people in the hills prized them and wore them as jewelry, which annoyed the archbishop down in the capital. Still, thought Sister Mary Columbo when she thought of it at all, bringing all those rosaries was a useful defense against the habit of ritual marking and the piercing of nostrils, earlobes, and sexual parts that was still practiced for ornamental reasons among the most backward of the hill people.
“It is too horrible sometimes,” Sister Agnes had confessed one night during the summer, on their last mission in the hills, after another baby had died of polio.
“God is with us,” Sister Mary Columbo had said. She had grown up in New York City, in the section called Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side. The remarkable thing was that when she spoke of God, she believed all she said.
The Jeep was covered with dust so that the windshield was opaque save for the half-circle cleared by the wipers. The Jeep followed the last long blind curve to the summit. It was necessary to drive slowly here because a driver could not see a car coming from the direction of Madeleine; on the other hand, if you drove too slowly, there was a risk of stalling out the engine. Dense forests lined either side of the road. The tropical pines smelled sweet in the mountain air, and it was not so humid here. The road had been asphalt when it was built, but in too many places the asphalt had been broken up by neglect and the rains and the binding had dried up and the cinders broke away so that it was as treacherous as a gravel road. As the Jeep neared the summit of the hill that overlooked Madeleine, the road grew very narrow.
“Be careful,” said Sister Agnes, who always said such things at moments like this.
Sister Mary Columbo bit her lip. She shoved the gear down the last notch and popped the clutch. The wheels spun and bit at the sliding asphalt base and nearly lost it and bit again and this time, they dug in. The Jeep protested the incline. The Jeep climbed the last hundred yards to the top of the hill, whining against the strain. The sound of the motor was so loud that they did not hear the first burst of the automatic weapons.
Sister Mary St. John of God, who had been sitting next to the supplies in the rear jump seat, saw the top of Sister Agnes’ head blown off in a bloody clump. She saw this and was puzzled for a fraction of a second and then she could hear the sound of the weapons and she understood.
The bullets smashed
the old nun’s face and she fell sideways, still gripping the roll bar, still staring with sightless eyes now at the bloody bowl of Sister Agnes’ head.
Sister Mary Columbo flinched at the firing because she had flinched for two years in Vietnam and even when she got home, she flinched at every sudden, sharp report. She did not look at Sister Agnes but pushed at the pedal and urged the engine up. The Jeep bucked and slipped again on the asphalt and then smashed sideways at a very slow speed into the soft wood of the pine trees at the side of the road. Sister Mary Columbo was slammed forward and cut her head on the windshield.
“I’m all right,” she said in an odd voice to her dead companions. “I’m all right,” she repeated and her voice was detached from her body. She felt no pain. She heard no sound, not even the firing that came from the men who were in the forest. She felt very calm. She stared at the trees.
The bullet struck her chest.
She spun around against the steering wheel. She saw Sister Agnes then. Blood covered her face and her dead, open eyes.
“I’m all right,” she said softly.
The second bullet smashed into her back and she jerked like a puppet and fell out of the Jeep onto the soft undergrowth beneath the pines on the side of the road. She tasted blood on her lips.
The men came out of the forest then and took the plastic cases of medical supplies from the back of the Jeep. They had to pull Sister Mary St. John of God’s body out of the Jeep to get all the supplies. One of the men prodded at the body of Sister Mary Columbo at the side of the road and said something that made the other men laugh. Someone fired his automatic weapon again into the trees. The birds were silent. When the firing stopped, there was no sound at all. The engine had died in the soft crash into the trees and made no sound.
“Should we burn the Jeep?” one of the men asked in the singsong patois.
“No. There is no need to destroy it. It’s always good to leave a vehicle like that. You don’t know when it might be useful sometime.”
One of them tore Sister Mary Columbo’s blouse and turned her over. He took out his knife and cut her brassiere. Her wounds were still bleeding and there was blood on her lips. The man used the knife to cut a small mark above her breasts. It looked like a geometric symbol.