Roy gave her a week. She called after four days.
Roy drove under towering roadside trees, dipped below the view of distant sea, and began to smell the village at the foot of the hills, wood smoke and the sweet stink of garbage. A natural stream ran alongside the road. A small reservoir that had once been the water source for the village lower down and the wealthy houses in the hills was now abandoned. The village depended on the stream which began high in the mountains, in mist-cool, fragrant forests he’d seen as a boy; an evergreen, seemingly pre-Columbian world existed there, though today it was higher in the mountains and further away. Fantastic flowers, variously spurred, lobed and pouched, abounded. Some were epiphytes, bulging with purple, red, and blue. As a teenager, he’d been reminded of their textures and colors when he first saw between the legs of a woman. In a somewhat intoxicated, trancelike state in the dimly lit room, he’d stroked her and whispered, Botany.
What? She’d lifted her dark, beautiful head.
So he’d breathed her name. Annalee.
Up here, silly, she’d replied.
The land, rising steeply on either side of the road, held bush and trees, but these trees were smaller than the old-forest ones Roy had passed higher up. Sections were planted with vegetables and fruit trees. Shacks rested on stones and bricks. Overhead, the treetops met and the entire area was shaded, and the stream, wider here with occasional glints, trickled and swished. Roy crossed a narrow bridge. Below, dark-skinned young women sitting on rocks were washing clothes. Others, scantily clad in bras and panties, were bathing. Two of the bathers waved and smiled. And shaking themselves, they asked if he wanted them.
After the bridge, after the stream and women and cool shadows, the road entered hard sunlight. The land opened and dwellings became concrete, but the sense of hardship remained. Houses, little more than the shacks he had seen earlier, were close. Few were painted. Around a bend, boys ran and shouted at him, moving their cricket game in the road just enough for him to pass. One spat on the windshield as Roy slowed. “Gone!” another yelled.
Then Roy saw Freddie moving smoothly and quickly, tall, too slim, dreadlocked Freddie, resident drug dealer, called Red Boy when he was a child, and now a member of an armed gang with political connections. As children, he and Roy had hunted in the green mountains. Freddie waved for Roy to stop and ordered the boys back. “Them don’t know, eh,” Freddie nodded. “Times change.”
“Freddie.” They touched hands.
“Pass some water on the windshield, boss.”
Roy hesitated, then sprayed the windshield. Water and light thickened on the glass, and the world went briefly out of focus.
Freddie pulled a rag from his pocket, saying, “Leave the wipers. Lemme show them little bitches we is friends.” Roy felt foolish watching his childhood friend who’d taught him to make slingshots wipe the glass in front of him. He glanced at the boys. They stood apart, silent, mystified, and respectful. Freddie wrung the rag and said, “Gervase.”
“Freddie?”
“Come.” Freddie tucked the rag back into his trousers, leaving most of it exposed to dry. A boy of maybe twelve stepped forward, trembling. “Come, I say!” Freddie shouted.
Gervase, head lowered, moved closer.
Roy shifted and said, “Freddie . . .”
“Chill, breds,” Freddie replied, raising a palm. Then to Gervase: “Watch Mr. Gonzales’s son. You hear your mammy talk ’bout Mr. Gonzales, right?” Years ago, Roy’s father had given Freddie’s parents financial assistance.
Gervase nodded.
“You hear Moses talk ’bout him, right?”
Gervase nodded again.
“And you hear I talk ’bout him too, not so?”
The boy nodded once more.
“This is Roy, Mr. Gonzales’s son. Watch him.”
Gervase raised his head and looked at Roy, who acknowledged him with a half-smile.
“Gone,” Freddie said.
Gervase turned but was unable to miss the slap from Freddie’s heavy hand. It caught the back of his head just beneath his right ear. He staggered, dropped to his knees, then rose and ran up the road.
Freddie reached for Roy’s hand on the steering wheel and held it between his palms. He bent to Roy. “Praise,” Freddie said. “Praise. I remember your father, I remember you.”
“Okay,” Roy said, wanting to go.
Freddie asked, “How the Lady? De Souza talk with you lately?”
Roy told him Fiona was fine, and that he hadn’t spoken with De Souza. Should he have? “Let you know later, breds.” Roy thanked him and drove off.
Fifteen minutes later, in her apartment in a sealed-off compound whose entrance was guarded, Fiona greeted Roy. He had been thinking about Freddie and his and Fiona’s discussion about De Souza the night before.
Fiona stared. “Are you all right?” Roy’s face was drawn. His arms rose for her and they embraced. “Roy,” she whispered. “Roy, talk to me.”
He did, but not about his father, Freddie, or De Souza. Then, after a cold drink, they went to the zoo.
It was 4:30. They were sipping beer at a table outside the tuck shop, half-hoping the zoo manager would return so they could learn more about Dr. Traboulay. Lovers had carved devotions into the old wooden tabletop. Fiona’s elegant middle finger circled the lip of her beer bottle carelessly, then slid to the label loosened with condensation.
Roy watched her intently. “Did you interview De Souza?”
“I did.” Her eyes were mischievous.
“I knew it.” Roy sat back, crestfallen. “Doesn’t sound like a good move to me, especially since he wants to get you into bed.”
Fiona’s expression changed. “At one point the phone rang, and he had to step out. From the look on his face I knew there was no surveillance in the room. Also, he couldn’t return in less than two minutes. And, of course, there were the steps, creaky wooden ones . . . dear things.”
“You went to his house?”
“Of course, darling.”
Roy shook his head and huffed. “Who did you have call?”
She shrugged her shoulders, winked.
“He must really regret the day he met you.”
“Do you?” Fiona lifted her face.
But Roy asked, “What did you find?”
She gave him her dazzling smile, exactly like the one at the jaguar’s cage earlier, and tapped her temple. “When he returned, he was completely flustered. We chatted a bit; I asked a few more questions, then I got up to leave. He walked me to the door.” Fiona drank the last of her beer. “He tried to kiss me.”
Roy paled. He glanced around and stood. “Let’s get out of here. All these cages make me sick.”
“Oh?” Fiona put her bottle down and rose. “Oh,” she said demurely. She took his arm. “Kiss me.”
Roy didn’t. He was unsure where she was going with this.
Fiona said seriously, “He actually did try to kiss me.”
Roy stepped away. “Stop it.” But his words lacked conviction. Something else was bothering him. “Did you go through his desk?” he asked, facing away from her, staring into the confines of the tuck shop.
“He grabbed my tits, shoved his hand between my legs, and tried to drool on my mouth. I kicked him where he deserved.”
Roy tried to stay calm. “Oh, so you didn’t go through his desk?”
“Can’t you ask something else?”
“We should go.” He took her arm and began striding to the exit.
“Okay. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I was just doing my job. Didn’t think you’d be so interested.”
He jerked her to a halt. “And what do I have to do to show I’m interested, really interested, Fiona, tell me.”
“Are you jealous?”
Roy didn’t reply. A heavyset man in hiking boots, new jeans, and belt, his brand name jersey a dark navy-blue, appeared. His right hand worked a toothpick protruding from his mouth; the left was half-inserted into a front pocket. He nodded the typical
island greeting, one stranger to another on a pleasant afternoon: “All right.”
“Okay,” Roy replied.
Fiona glanced at the man as Roy pulled her along, increasing his pace and not looking back. They passed the waterfowl pond. At the exit, they hurried through the turnstile, Fiona whispering to Roy, asking if he’d brought his gun, Roy ignoring her. He hit his knee on one of the lower bars and cursed. As they got in the car, under the massive spreading branches of a samaan, Fiona was visibly nervous, glancing back at the exit. Roy drove, thinking of somewhere peaceful, close by.
“Roy, what’s wrong? Are we being paranoid?”
“Tell me.”
She was silent.
The parked car ticked with heat from the winding ascent. Roy and Fiona leaned against a low rock wall. They were alone. A burned-out building, roofless, its peeling concrete pillars intertwined with vines, stood to their left. He could see several valleys of the northern range descending to the gulf. Hovels, set on the valleys’ slopes, faded in and out of the hazy air. Those that didn’t fade were closer, below them in the fold of this valley. The scent of kerosene fires, garbage, and dust drifted up the hillsides. Subdued reggae and Baptist bells mingled, made a steady throb, like that of a distant party, one he’d been hearing since childhood. As though once begun at the foot of the hills, the party could never cease, must overwhelm the hills and valleys, beating on and on, its hovels eating into the earth of the island.
Before them the land sloped down to the city far below, and to the harbor, where the bulks of several shipwrecks lay side-up. Long feathery grass, green and brown-tinted and like young sugarcane in texture, rippled in a light breeze. It moved in great spreading greens down the hillside, dry-brown tints reflecting gold, a child’s version of a sea. They both watched it. Some of the last mountains of the Northern Range, the highest on the island, rose dark and silent behind them, the beginning of another world. Beyond the mountains lay the sea and the deep blue air of the Atlantic.
“Are you involved with De Souza?” Fiona asked quietly, staring at the gulf.
“I’m acquainted with him. We see each other at meetings, conferences, like the one where we met. You know that.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
Roy shrugged. “The rumors are there. Trinidad is loaded with them. How can people not make assumptions? It’s how the island amuses itself, Fiona.” Roy hesitated. “There’s no evidence on De Souza. You couldn’t have seen anything in his house. And even if you had, you wouldn’t have taken it.”
“Damn right, I took nothing. But I saw something.”
He waited.
“An address book with names of members of the judiciary, the business elite—your father among them—and contacts in Antigua, Curaçao, St. Maarten. There were also Russian names, fax numbers, cell phone numbers—many crossed out, some not—and odd names, like nicknames or codes.”
Roy scratched the side of his neck, gripped the skin between his thumb and forefinger, and pinched. “So De Souza, who once did business with my father, and does on occasion with me, who’s presently buying paint for condos he’s sprucing up in South— and don’t ask me where he got the money—De Souza, who was at the signing of the drug treaty with the Americans three years ago, this De Souza, you think, is a criminal? And as for the Russians, they’re everywhere these days. Look at what they’ve been through. I mean, so what if De Souza has those contacts. He should. He’s in government and he’s a businessman.”
She was quiet before asking, “Roy, do you love me?”
Vultures, their wings fixed like black machetes, glided southward over the ruined restaurant. For the last five hundred years, Roy thought, this image was the most consistent for the Caribbean and South and Central America.
The tall grass rustled near Fiona. She shrank back against Roy. Out of the bush, separating it with a walking stick, and head held high, walked Dr. Edric Traboulay, his wristwatches reflecting the last of the afternoon sunlight.
“Ah! We meet again! I am presently experiencing a period of reasonable clarity,” he announced. “Those hummingbirds I mentioned earlier, these were the mountains Dr. William Smith and I climbed in search of them, but more to the east.” He waved the stick in the general direction. “Funny, but I still can’t recall the story I wanted to tell you at the zoo. My mind, these days, makes its own random selections. Anyway, during the dry seasons of the 1950s, we did not experience such arid conditions as occur today after every Christmas season. Hence, we were able to travel comfortably as there were few fires during that time.” He stood the stick in front of him, resting his hands on its gnarled end, his watches glinting in the light like the arm-sheaths of a knight. Roy wondered if the watches worked. Dr. Traboulay looked up at the mountains, his eyes soft, as if lost in some fond memory. Thin cuts from the tall grass crisscrossed his upper arms and ribs.
Fiona said, “You’re back, sir.” She glanced at Roy, unsure of everything around her.
“Please, Miss Lady and Mr. Gentleman, I mean no harm. I don’t often get to talk to such nice people. How, may I ask, did Lollipop seem?”
Roy said, “Who?”
“Oh! Forgive me. The jaguar, his name is Lollipop—at least that’s what some people think. Someone removed my sign last month. I made another then, but the new manager was reluctant to put it up. He said it did not cater to the public’s tastes. What, I ask, is wrong with a little poetry by Blake?”
“‘Tiger tiger, burning bright’?” Fiona asked, relaxing.
Dr. Traboulay’s face lit up. “Precisely, my dear! Just because Blake was writing about the Indian tiger does not mean the poem cannot be applied to Lollipop, a name I strongly recommend they change. But, alas, the manager will not hear of it. I haven’t given up, though. Imagine calling a jaguar Lollipop. You might as well name him Popsicle, or Kit Kat, names not worthy of the status of the jaguar. Surely this is obvious.” Dr. Traboulay, chin up, awaited response.
Fiona said, “I agree.”
“It’s a very beautiful animal,” Roy added.
“Exactly. You both are educated,” Dr. Traboulay continued, “unlike these foolish politicians, little boys they are. I’d send them back to school if I could. Nothing but a bureaucratic herd determined to master mediocrity—and worse.”
“And I’d help you,” Roy said, thinking of De Souza while edging to the passenger side of the car where Fiona had left the window down. “Perhaps you can tell us another story,” he suggested. Roy’s cell and a revolver were locked in the glove compartment. He slipped his hand into his pocket, and when Dr. Traboulay turned, he quickly removed the keys and unlocked the glove compartment. He stayed leaning on the car door.
“Everywhere I go these days, I recall another story, though details, some quite significant, often elude me,” Dr. Traboulay said. “My walk here was filled with memories, many I’d not recalled for ages. Chapters of my life sailed through my mind, around every corner, under every tree . . . They came to me out of the blue, literally.” He laughed. “I am rather partial to the odd cliché, now and then, if you’ll excuse me.” He walked toward the ruined restaurant. “For instance, this relic. I mean—” He broke off, became flustered, mumbled to himself in Latin, then reverted to the local dialect. “Jew man get he place burn down. Investigation say is arson. Police commissioner tell the Jew man to leave. Just so. And the insurance get seize.” Now he said, “The ways of the business community on this island have never ceased to amaze me.”
Watching Dr. Traboulay’s back, Roy got the revolver and cell from the glove compartment. He dropped the cell on the seat and pocketed the gun. Fiona noticed the gun and gave Roy a questioning look. “Just to be safe,” he whispered.
She slipped an arm around Roy’s as they joined Dr. Traboulay, who raised his stick at the ruins. “Allow me to tell you something about this restaurant. It was at the height of its popularity in 1960, shortly before Marlene Dietrich came out with, ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ I remember . . .
memories are everywhere you turn. Too many for me now, though.” Dr. Traboulay sighed, began again: “I was a waiter, had started working here in the mid-1950s, when I met Dr. William Smith at the bar one afternoon. Quite by chance we spoke about hummingbirds, about the fauna and flora of the island. He hired me as his assistant the following week. The restaurant gained some notoriety when Ernest Hemingway visited one evening. He was on his way back from Peru. Very decent to me he was! He asked many questions about the island, its natural history. He was returning to Cuba, and when I asked if he was sympathetic to Fidel Castro, he smiled and said yes, it was time. Sure enough, four years later—confusions within confusions.” Dr.Traboulay waved a hand past his head. “There was a picture of Ernest and his wife over the bar. I have never met such a free spirit. There was something remarkably human, good about him—and, as I learned after his death, something mean and cruel. People were so eager to judge his character. His work suffered as a result. Is nothing sacred? Sad the way he died. But they say there’s nothing quicker than a gunshot to the head. Is that not correct?” His tone was somber. He looked at Roy.
An early evening cool encircled them, a wind fresh with earth and sea, flowing down from the green mountains. The tall grass swayed. The haze of gray-white light over the gulf was gone. The horizon of sea and sunset was shades of gray, pale blue, and gold, with hints of lavender. Far to the south, pulsing out of the almost purple late-afternoon land, orange flames from the oil refinery became visible; they seemed to be tongues lapping through from another dimension, like devils testing a new frontier. All was quiet. The Baptist bells had subsided as the dusk deepened. The sounds of dogs were softer, more intermittent. The scent of wood smoke and kerosene was gone, breezed away. The certainty of night came upon them. Roy sensed something of what the conquistadors must have felt during their first nights on the island: the absolute promise of an infinity of tomorrows, to which no one would belong, of course—but the conquistadors would not have thought that; they had believed themselves righteous men, engaged in an ordained enterprise, one commandeered by Her Catholic Majesty, and, therefore, approved by God. All the world’s tomorrows belonged to them.
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