Queen of Angels

by Greg Bear

  Mary looked between them, thinking of the hairbrush, of getting away.

  “You are a most attractive woman,” Legar said. “Of the kind of beauty we call marabou, though you are not negro. Surely a person who chooses to be black is to be honored by those born to the condition?”

  She detected no sarcasm. “Thank you,” Mary said.

  “That you are a police officer as are we—very remarkable! Henri informs me you have discussed police procedures in Los Angeles. I am envious. May I know, as well?”

  Mary released the pressure on her clenched molars, smiled and leaned forward. “Certainly,” she said. Only now did Legar raise his eyes and look at her directly. “After I’ve spoken with the American embassy or with my superiors.”

  Legar blinked slowly.

  “It would be simple courtesy to let a fellow police officer discover what her present orders are when she is prevented from doing her duty,” she told him.

  Legar shook his head and turned in his chair to stare pointedly at Soulavier. Soulavier did not react. “No communication,” Legar said softly.

  “Please tell me why,” Mary pursued. The thought of going anywhere with Soulavier or any other member of this constabulary frightened her. If she was to be used as some sort of political pawn she wanted to understand her position clearly.

  “I do not know why,” Legar said. “We have been ordered to treat you well, to watch over you and to make your stay pleasant. You need not be concerned.”

  “I’m kept here against my will,” Mary said. “If I’m a political prisoner, let me know now. Simple courtesy…between law enforcement officers.”

  Legar pushed his chair back and stood. He rolled the middle button of his shirt between two fingers, regarding button and fingers speculatively. “You may take her away,” he said. “This is not useful.”

  Soulavier touched her shoulder. She flicked his hand away, glared at him and stood. Control the anger but show it. “I’d like to speak with John Yardley.”

  “He does not even know you are here, Mademoiselle,” Soulavier said. Legar nodded.

  “Please leave,” the Inspector General said.

  “He knows I’m here,” Mary said. “My superiors had to get his permission for me to come here. If he doesn’t know he’s a fool or he’s been misled by his people.”

  Legar thrust out his jaw. “Nobody misleads Colonel Sir.”

  “And he is certainly no fool,” Soulavier added hastily. “Please, Mademoiselle.” Soulavier tried to grip her elbow. She flicked the hand away again and gave him a look she hoped was intensely forbidding without being hysterical.

  “If this is Hispaniolan hospitality it’s very overrated,” she said. A mighty blow against the tyranny. They will be so hurt.

  “Take her out of here now,” Legar said. Soulavier was not gentle this time. He grabbed her firmly by both arms, lifted her with surprising strength and hauled her like cargo on a forklift out of the offices into the outside hallway. Mary did not struggle, simply closed her eyes and withstood the indignity. She had gone over the line far enough already; Soulavier was not being brutal merely expedient.

  He deposited her swiftly on the tile floor and removed a handkerchief to wipe his brow. Then he went back to retrieve his stovepipe hat which he had dropped. But her insides turned to ice and she wondered whether in fact they would find it useful to kill her.

  “My pardon,” Soulavier said as he emerged from the double doors. He stood on Damballa’s head and brushed off his hat. “You did not behave well. The Inspector General has anger…he becomes angry at times. He is a very important man. I dislike being around him when he is angry.”

  Mary walked quickly down the hallway, through the entrance and to the limousine, where she stood for a moment getting her bearings. “Take me to wherever I’m supposed to stay now,” she said.

  “There are beautiful places to visit on this island,” Soulavier said.

  “Fap the beautiful places. Take me to wherever I’m supposed to be detained and leave me there.”

  An hour alone. That was what she needed. She would try several things, test the bars on this cage, find out how competent her captors really were.

  In the limousine Soulavier sat across from her, brooding. Mary watched the gray and tan institutional architecture of the rebuilt downtown move by in monotonous procession: banks, department stores, a museum and gallery of native Haitian art. Streets empty of tourists. No street merchants. They passed another patrol of military vehicles then a long line of parked tanks. Soulavier leaned forward and craned his neck to inspect the tanks.

  “You should be more patient,” he said. “You should know these are not good times. Be aware.” His tone had changed to sullen irritation. “You do not make me look good in front of the Inspector General.”

  Mary said nothing.

  “Do you see what is happening here? There is a weakening,” Soulavier said. “Opposition is coming to the fore. There have been money problems, banks closing. Loans defaulted. Dominicans especially they are angry. Do you think we have troops out to repel foreign invaders?” His expression was sharp, one eyebrow raised in dramatic inquiry.

  “I don’t know anything about your politics,” Mary said.

  “Then you are the fool, Mademoiselle. You have been played as a gamepiece but you are ignorant of your role.”

  She looked at Soulavier with new respect. The rebuke echoed some of her own self accusing thoughts. She was not so unlearned; still it might be best to let him believe she was ignorant.

  “You put me in danger to talk to you,” he continued. “But if you are truly an innocent then you should know the shape of the trap. That is all I can give you.”

  “All right,” Mary said.

  “If you go with me to Leoganes you will be away from Port-au-Prince and whatever might happen here. Leoganes is smaller, more peaceful. You go there on pretense that we are protecting you. Dominicans in the domestic army…They are opposed to Colonel Sir. He has appeased them for years now but we are in bad shape. Mineral prices are down around the world. Your nanotechnology, which the industrialized world guards so closely…You extract minerals from garbage and seawater much more cheaply than drilling and mining.”

  Mary lost her bearings, felt almost disembodied now, this conversation on economic theory was so out of place.

  “You do not use our armies, you no longer buy our weapons, you stop using our minerals, our timber…Now our tourism is being strangled. What are we to do? We do not want to see our children starve like insects. That is what Colonel Sir must worry about. He has no time for you and me.” He shook his hands vigorously at her as if flinging away drops of water. Then he settled back into the seat, folded his arms and lifted his jaw. “He is a beleaguered man. All around him people who were once friends now they are enemies. The balance, you know. The balance. So the courts and judges of your nation, the judicial branch, tells him he is a criminal. Mixed signals when once the President, the executive branch, treated him like a beloved partner. This fans the flames, Mademoiselle. I am taking risks even speaking of these things now. But for you I still give advice. Just for you.”

  Mary watched him for a moment. Sincere or not he was putting a few things in perspective for her. If Colonel Sir was losing control she might be in more trouble than she imagined. “Thank you,” she said.

  Soulavier shrugged. “Will you travel with me away from Port-au-Prince and from these damned…domestic army machines?”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll need a few minutes back at the bungalow alone, to calm myself.”

  He shrugged again magnanimously. “After that we will go to Leoganes.”

  Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How’s that for a powerful argument’?

  —Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations

  46

  She hung on to him like a limpet. She had said something earlier a
bout his condition making her the stable one in this duality—something to that effect—her words a dull murmur in Richard’s memory. She was addressing him and he felt some minor compulsion to listen to her rather than to sink completely into his private thoughts.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she suggested. “We’ve been lovers off and on for two years, but I don’t know anything about you.”

  + In my apartment. Just myself. Her. She asked something.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Tell me about when you were married.”

  He sat forward on the couch, stiff muscles complaining. He had been sitting there since breakfast, forty-five minutes without moving. “Let’s switch on the LitVid,” he said.

  “Please tell me. I’d like to help.”

  “Nadine,” he said flatly, “nothing’s wrong. Why not just leave me alone.”

  She puffed out her lips and shook her head, feigning hurt but refusing to give up. “You’re in trouble. All this has upset you and I know what that’s like. It’s not good to be alone when you’re in trouble.”

  + Anything to avoid.

  He reached out for her and tried to caress her breast but she sideslipped deftly and sat in the brokendown chair across from the couch, out of reach. “It’ll be good to talk. I know you’re not a bad man. You’re just very upset. When I get upset, sometimes my friends help me talk it through…”

  “I’m unemployed, I’m untherapied, I’m unpublished, I’m getting old, and I have you,” he said. “So?”

  She ignored his bitterness. “You were married once. Madame de Roche told me that.”

  He watched her closely. If he jumped forward now he could get her. And then what would he do. He felt himself fading in and out like a bad signal. Patches of Goldsmith’s poetry spoke themselves in Goldsmith’s voice. That voice was a lot more magnetic than his own.

  + I am a simple man. Simple men vanish now.

  “What was her name? Did you get divorced?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Divorced.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  He squinted. Goldsmith’s voice fading. Of all things he did not want to think about Gina and Dione. He had put aside that misery years ago.

  “Talk to me. It’s what you need, Richard.” Note of triumph. She was into it. Her cheeks flushed beneath a painfully sincere tilt of eyebrows.

  “Nadine, please. It’s a very unpleasant subject.”

  She set her jaw and her eyes brightened. “I’d like to know. To listen.”

  Richard looked up at the ceiling and swallowed hard. The poetry was fading; that much was good. Maybe she had something. The talking cure.

  “You’re trying to therapy me,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling. With the chuckle the poetry returned; he had rejected this ploy and again Nadine was a buzzing nonentity and he could grab her if he wanted to. Make his statement as Goldsmith had. Break free.

  Nadine grimaced. “Richard, we’re just talking. We have our problems, all of us, and talking is okay. It’s not intrusive.”

  “This kind of talking is.”

  “What happened? Was she that bad for you?”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  Nadine bit her lower lip. He looked at her with what he hoped was a forbidding expression.

  + I’m a simple man. Don’t you see I’m simply waiting for the right moment.

  The poetry faded again, returned again. Moses. Blood sacrifice to keep away the wrath of God. Richard had looked that up once; Goldsmith’s interpretation of the story was not orthodox. Circumcision. What did they call circumcision in women: infibulation. Clitoridectomy. + The things one gathers leading a literary life.

  He put aside a polite suggestion from somewhere below that he start crying. His expression remained fixed and mild. “We were divorced,” he said.

  + Not true.

  “We were going to be divorced, I mean,” he corrected himself. Neither he nor whoever spoke with Goldsmith’s poetry was confessing now. An earlier fellow was poking forth. The one who had been married. + I thought I killed him.

  “Yes?”

  Again the suggestion: This is best spoken of while you are crying, you know.

  No tears.

  “Dione was her name. I was a lobe sod for Workers Inc.”

  “Yes.”

  “We had a daughter.” Again he swallowed. “Gina. She was sweet.”

  “You loved them both very much,” Nadine suggested. He scowled then chuckled. Even in her helpfulness she intruded, did not know where to stop. He saw himself inadequately modeled within her and that was the story of Nadine’s life, knowing thyself or anyone else being impossible for her. Broken modeler.

  “Yes,” he said. “I did. But I wanted to write and I realized I couldn’t do that while I stayed a lobe sod. So I talked about quitting.” He watched. She came up to the bait. Soon he would grab her; confession not such a bad thing, making her lower her guard. The voice of the other continued.

  “That worried her,” Nadine suggested.

  “Yes. That worried her. She didn’t like poetry. Writing. She was strictly vid. It got worse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Much worse. Gina was in between. I felt like I was coming apart. Finally I had to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “We waited a year. I tried to write. Dione worked two jobs. Neither of us was therapied but that didn’t matter so much back then. I never sent anything out to be published. I went to work for another company. Copyediting newspaper text. Dione said she wanted me back. I said I wanted her. But we couldn’t bring ourselves together. Something else. Every time.”

  “Yes.”

  “The divorce was almost final. Gina was taking it bad. Dione wanted to take her in for therapy. I said no. I said let her be herself, let her work it out. Dione said Gina was she was seven Dione said Gina was talking about death a lot. I said yes but she’s too young to know anything about it, it’s curiosity, let it be. She’ll grow.”

  “Yes.”

  He could just reach out and take one arm, turn her around. + How do you go about it with your bare hands. Without tools.

  + It would be a good idea to cry now.

  “I’m listening,” Nadine said.

  “The divorce. Two weeks and it would be through the courts. Informal proceedings, no court appearance, all assets divided already.”

  “That’s the way I’ve done it,” Nadine said.

  “She was bringing Gina to me for a weekend. We did that. We didn’t want to hurt her.”

  Nadine said nothing to encourage him. Even in her insensitivity she could sense something disagreeable coming.

  “There was a slaveway tangle. A bus. Their bus. Small quake in the valley had severed slaveway grids. They went into a retaining wall and seven cars slammed into them. Gina died. Dione too, a day later.”

  Nadine’s eyes grew wider. She looked feverish. “My God,” she said breathlessly.

  + She’s specking it prime. She likes digging her fingers in, kneading the humus.

  “I took it alone. I didn’t get therapy. I walked around like a zombie. I thought I really loved Dione. I didn’t expect anything so final. Gina came to talk with me before bed. I was really flying. I stayed away from therapy because I felt it would dishonor them, Gina and Dione. I made a little shrine for them and burned incense. I wrote poetry and burned it.

  “After a few months, I went back to work for a while. I had met Goldsmith before. I started to come up. Out of that swamp. He helped me. He told me about seeing his father, his dead father, when he was a child. He told me I wasn’t going crazy.”

  Nadine shook her head slowly. “Richard, Richard,” she said, obligatory sympathy.

  His head was crowded. There was his present self and something like Goldsmith and this old Richard Fettle and all of his memories in train. The crowding made him want to lie down in a dark room.

  “We should go for a walk,” Nadine said decisively. “After something like
this you need to go out and do something vigorous, get some exercise.”

  She reached out for him. He gave her his hand and stood up, joints popping loudly.

  “You never told anybody,” she said as they descended the third floor stairs.

  “No,” he agreed. “Only Goldsmith.” He lingered a step behind and watched the back of her neck.

  47

  Karl prepared the inducers in the probe room. David and Carol worked with dedicated arbeiters to check and recheck all connections and remotes before bringing Goldsmith in. Martin watched the preparations closely, standing out of the way, saying nothing but making his presence felt.

  “You’re hovering,” Carol told him, rolling an equipment table past the control console.

  “My prerogative,” he said, smiling quickly.

  “You haven’t eaten.” She stowed the table, stuffed hands in pockets and sauntered up beside him with a mocking air of chastisement. “You’ve been working too hard. You’re pale. You’ll need your strength for the probe.”

  He regarded her seriously. “I need to talk with you.” He swallowed and glanced away. “Before we go in.”

  “I presume you mean over something to eat.”

  “Yes. I think everything’s ready here. Except Albigoni. Lascal was supposed to bring him in…”

  “We can go ahead without him.”

  “I want him here as a guarantee. If his enthusiasm’s flagging…”

  Karl passed by and Martin stopped. This part of the probe did not concern the others.

  “Lunch,” Carol suggested. “Late lunch on the beach. It’s moderately cool. Put on a sweater.”

  Martin looked up and saw Lascal enter the gallery of twenty seats overlooking the amphitheater. Albigoni came in behind him. Martin nodded a greeting to them and turned back to Carol. “Good idea. After Goldsmith’s down and we’ve injected the nano.”

  Part superstition, part supposition, Martin had always demanded that triplex probe subjects not see or be able to recognize their investigators. He thought it best for a feedback prober to enter the Country fresh and unknown. To that end David and Karl—who might have to join the probe team if there was difficulty—gathered with Martin and Carol behind a curtain at the rear of the amphitheater as the subject was wheeled in on a gurney.