Shortly before the surrender of Metz to the Prussians, a frantic Georges de Berville shipped his daughter eastward to what he imagined would be the safety of Paris. Marie-Ange arrived in the capital on the second day of September, but within three weeks the city was besieged by the enemy. She lodged with her Aunt Aurore at first but soon gained admission to the Institute of Bon Secours as a postulant. Calledgardes malades, these women were devoted to the care of the sick, both rich and poor, in their own homes. All through the terrible winter of 1870 Marie-Ange worked ceaselessly in the poorer quarters of the Left Bank, bringing food, coal, and medicine when she could, bought from her own pocket at siege prices, and toward the end, when there was nothing to be had at any price, she brought a cheerful face and a comforting word.
Paris capitulated in January, but the agonies of the city were far from over. In March, the people of Paris revolted, and the revolutionary movement known as the Commune took over the city. During this time, Marie-Ange was working in Neuilly, which had been heavily bombarded by government forces. When the Commune began to arrest priests and religious, she merely changed her clothes, dropping the habit of Bon Secours and resuming the costume that had served her well in the Battle of Gravelotte.
That spring, the government forces advanced irresistibly, and the Communards were pushed back to a few heavily defended bastions. In the last week in May, Marie-Ange found herself in a wine cellar in Monmartre, where she had established a dressing station with no medicines but wine and no bandages but old sacking and the torn-up garments of the dead, washed in vinegar. By May 23, surrounded on all sides, subject to a ferocious cannonade, the Communards in the strongpoints of Monmartre lost heart and began to drift away. Her companions urged Marie-Ange to flee as well, for she could do nothing for the dying men and women in her charge, besides which, the attacking troops were shooting every rebel they encountered. She had almost been convinced of the futility of her plight when, as she later wrote, “all at once I became aware of a Figure at my side, the Blessed Virgin, who said to me, ‘As I did not desert my Son at the foot of the cross, remain faithful to your charges, for these too are beloved of Christ.’ So I composed myself for death with a good heart, although I was saddened that I would never more see my dear papa or my brothers short of our glorious reunion in paradise.”
Then she heard a final fusilade and the door crashed down. The soldiers made to bayonet the helpless wounded, but Marie-Ange threw her frail body in their way, and cried, “Soldiers of France! Are you not Christian men? In the name of Christ and his Blessed Mother, have mercy!” Despite this plea, it is likely that Marie-Ange de Berville would have been killed in that vile cellar, had not the Providence of God brought Lieutenant Auguste Letoque to the spot at that very moment. This young officer was a close friend of Jean-Pierre de Berville and had often been entertained at Bois Fleury. Striking the rifles away with his saber, he shouted, “Fools! Would you slay an angel!”
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Fifteen
They drove north and then east for hours into a part of Florida where Lorna had never been. When they left the highway they seemed to enter a different world, one that had nothing to do with the jaunty vacationland image the state tried to project. Driving on two-lane blacktop bordered by murky canals they passed burning fields of sugarcane stubble and slowed often behind mesh-sided trailers piled high with cut cane. Once they passed a stake-bed truck full of standing cutters, men and a few women, scarfed against the dust that covered their clothes, that whitened their plum-black skin.
“My fate,” said Paz as they drove by, “although these are Jamaicans, not Cubans. They fly them in for the cutting season. Americans won’t cut cane.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“About Americans not cutting cane? It’s a national scandal.”
“No, about escaping your fate.”
“Duh, I feel good, I guess,” said Paz.
Lorna felt herself blush. “I didn’t mean?” she began, but he cut her off. “No, that’s okay, but I have to admit that once in a while I grab my machete and chop an acre or two just to keep in practice, in case you all decide equal rights was a bad idea. How about you? Did you escape your fate?”
“No, I’m solidly in the groove. My daddy designed me to be a bright little thing and accumulate academic honors and gain a respectable profession requiring a Ph.D. and do theTimes Sunday crossword puzzle in less than twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes is pretty good,” said Paz. “I do it in about three.”
“You don’t!”
“Yeah, I just leave it for a week and then they show you how to fill it in. It takes no time at all.”
“Laugh if you want to,” she said, laughing, “but it’s an important part of my pathetic teacup of self-respect. My brother, Bert, feels like you do about the sacred puzzle, though. He escapedhis fate.”
“Oh, yeah? What was he supposed to be?”
“A famous research scientist M.D. discovering the cure for cancer. It turned out he liked girls and money instead. He’s in bonds in New York, does fairly well, I think: nice apartment, a place in the Hamptons. He’s on his third wife, because I guess the first two were not quite vapid enough to suit his refined tastes. Fortunately, Daddy had a spare child. Unfortunately, a girl. Fortunately, much more academic talent than Bert. Unfortunately, not enough to get into medical school. Fortunately, just enough to snag an Ivy League Ph.D., so she can be introduced as my daughter, Dr. Wise.”
“So the cancer cure is pretty much out?”
“Afraid so. My sad story. What a stench! Whatis that?”
“Sugar refineries. Like a herd of brontosaurs got drunk on rum and puked up. We’ll be out of it soon. Here’s a point: as sad as your story is, you don’t have to breathe this in every day.”
“I’m not going to get any sympathy at all from you, am I?”
“No, although if I contract cancer I might be fairly pissed off at you. And your brother. Speaking of fate, this guy we’re going to see, totally designed by nature to be a police detective. Mozart, Michael Jordan, that level. Probably cleared more felonies than anyone else in the history of the Miami PD. And because of a situation outside his control he gets the boot.”
“What happened to him?”
Paz told her the story, the official one, about how Cletis had been driven crazy by African-style witch doctor drugs, and then she wanted to know more about the famous Voodoo Killer case, and he supplied more of the official version.
She said, “Why does your voice go all funny when you talk about this? It’s like you’re one of those brainwashed Korean War POWs talking about how they did germ warfare.”
“You detect prevarication.”
“My stockin-trade. What really happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Okay. There’s a tribe in Africa that can do real sorcery. They can give you dreams, become invisible, create zombies. They can create psychedelic drugs in their own bodies and make you see anything they want you to see. An African-American went over there and became a witch, and then came back here and started eviscerating pregnant women to get the power he needed to destroy America and we couldn’t stop him worth a damn. And the spirits exist.”
She laughed. “No, really.”
“See? I rest my case.” Then he changed the subject to Cletis Barlow in his prime, his amazing feats, his peculiar beliefs, his kindness to Paz. “I’d still be, as the saying goes in the department, chasing niggers up Second Avenue if he hadn’t dragged me into the detectives. I had a couple of nice collars, but no one was looking to promote me to detective. The ethnic politics of the Miami PD are a little weird. So I owe him a lot.”
“A father figure.”
“You could say that.”
“And the actual father? Not on the scene?”
&
nbsp; A long pause here. Lorna thought that Paz was ignoring the question and she felt a small pang of regret for having asked it. They drove out of the sugar regions and into a pleasanter country, green pastures occupied by humped white cattle staring stupidly from behind wire fencing.
“The short version,” said Paz, after clearing his throat, “is he’s a rich white Cuban. He loaned my mom the money to get her started in catering, and used her ass as collateral. I was the product. He does not have paternal feelings. When I got a little famous around that case and was on local TV a lot, he took his family on a world tour, lest anyone make the connection.”
“That’s really sad. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. But,amor fati.”
“Pardon…?”
“Amor fati. Love your fate. A friend of mine used to say that. The secret of happiness.”
Lorna did not respond to this, as she did not wish to explore the source of the Latin tag, whom she suspected was on the staff of the University of Girl. She looked out the window. Soon they turned off the blacktop onto a gravel road and off that onto a narrow dirt track between rows of dusty pines, past a sign readingBARLOW Registered Charolais, and into a yard containing a red-painted, tin-roofed farmhouse with a wide screen porch, a barn, some outbuildings, and a tall, rangy woman in her early sixties, wearing a tattered straw hat and an apron.
Paz got out of the car and into this woman’s warm embrace.
Introductions then: Dr. Wise, Edna Barlow, Paz slipping the doctor in there, Lorna wondering why. She shook the woman’s hand, which was hard and strong, and looked into her face, which was plain, strong, seamed, tanned, a stranger to the spa, obviously, and equipped with sharp blue eyes. Lorna wore her formal face, as she did with people who might be offended by advanced ideas. She felt like she had walked into a 1930s movie.
They sat on the porch, which Mrs. Barlow called a veranda, and drank sweet iced tea from clunky glasses. Paz and Mrs. Barlow chatted about what he’d been doing and what they’d been doing, and the doings of the three junior Barlows (college, the marines, high school basketball), and although Mrs. B. attempted to bring her into the conversation, it was awkward, leaving Lorna wondering what she was doing here. She caught Edna looking searchingly at her several times and wondered what that was about.
A white Dodge pickup came dusting into the yard, and proved to hold Cletis Barlow and his sixteen-year-old son, James. More greetings, but apparently men didn’t hug chez Barlow. Lorna thought Cletis Barlow had the meanest face she ever saw on a man, the face of the leader of a lynch mob from central casting, except there was a nice person living inside it by mistake. It was all scars, lumps, bad teeth, and wrong angles, and the eyes were the color of a washboard.
They got a tour of the rancho then, the two guests in borrowed rubber boots moving gingerly among the big cattle in the barn, swatting, but not too obviously, at the many flies. Paz was trying to sense the mental status of his former partner; Lorna felt like she was on a school trip, a feeling enhanced by James, who seemed fascinated by her, although he called her ma’am and told her more about Charolais cattle than she wanted to know.
An early supper is the custom here. Through a manipulation that is proof against all of Lorna’s psych skills and feminist principles, she finds herself in the kitchen with Edna, preparing snap beans and tomatoes from their garden and peeling potatoes. Lorna realizes that she has never actually peeled a potato. At home she was an honorary boy, the children were called in to a laden board, the mother never requesting her daughter’s help. Message: This girl is for higher things, Dad things, feminism clearly not applying to Mom, although Dad talks a good game, and just as clearly she has fallen into a time warp here in south-central Fla. Who peels potatoes? Lorna’s entertainments are infrequent, and at those few that involve spuds, she bakes them, and while they bake she dispenses wit in the living room.
Edna is watching, incredulous. Finally, she speaks. “Honey, I believe you haven’t peeled many potatoes.”
“Not even one,” admits Lorna, and now she can put down the peeler and apply paper toweling to her wounds.
“Well, sit yourself down then. I only asked you to be sociable,” says Edna, who now stands by the sink and with rapid flicks of the instrument causes the skins to practically leap off the pesky tubers.
Lorna feels obliged to compliment the woman on this skill, which she does and then feels unutterably patronizing, so adds a personal slamette. “I’m not very domestic, I guess.”
“Well, you being a doctor and all, I figured you had enough to be doing. I just drug you in here so the boys could talk by themselves.”
“Are they telling secrets?”
“I don’t know, but they do like to get off alone. The two of them’re real close, and Cletis has missed it something awful, although he’d never say a word. Anyway, I can’t abide a man in the kitchen. It gets me all nervous.”
“But if you feel that way, you get stuck with all the cooking and serving. And the cleaning up.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘stuck,’ exactly,” says Edna. “There’s enough work to do in the world and I don’t see why it can’t be divided up so’s we all know what we’re supposed to do and get good at it. I believe the Lord intended it that way. I’ve changed truck oil, and greased bearings, and run farm machinery, and hauled feed. Who d’you think ran this place while Cletis was off being a policeman down south?” She holds up the peeler. “Honey, if you think this is hard, you try castrating a bull calf. No, thank you! Which is why I thank the good Lord for men. Although they can be a trial. How long have you known our Jimmy?”
The unexpected out-of-context question of the skilled interrogator. Lorna feels suddenly off balance. “Not long at all. We’re working on a case together.”
Edna seems a little disappointed in this answer, so Lorna adds, “He seems very good at what he does.”
Here Edna turns on her an unexpectedly radiant smile. “Oh, my, yes, he is. Oh, but we think the world of Jimmy Paz. He’s just the sweetest thing!”
The sweetest thing was at that moment in a sagging wicker chair on the porch vaguely wishing that Cletis had not added total abstinence to his skein of virtues. Paz wanted a drink and a cigar. He had told Cletis what Lorna had told him about the events in the locked ward, and was now relating what he knew about the Muwalid murder; it was tough going, Paz fearing that any moment Cletis would interrupt with a question about whether Paz had performed some action that might have broken open the case, which Paz had forgotten to do, and now it was too late. But when Cletis did stop him, it was about a detail from the first interrogation of Emmylou Dideroff.
“She saidwhat?”
“She said it would be an honor to be executed unjustly, like Jesus.”
“Well, well. If that don’t beat all! I’d sure like to meet this woman.”
“Yeah, the two of you’d get along real well, putting the pope to one side for a while.”
“You think she was serious?”
“I guess. That was the saint part talking, though. There’s another part in there that’s not so nice.”
“That don’t signify,” said Barlow dismissively. “There’s demons in us all. Go ahead, what happened then?”
Paz finished his tale, adding the business about Wilson and Packer and Cortez and the material from the first volume of the diaries. After that, Barlow thought for a while, leaning his ladderback chair up against the side of his house and chewing on a toothpick, staring into space. Paz knew better than to interrupt him at this juncture.
They were called to supper.
Barlow let his chair go forward with a thump. “It don’t work, Jimmy,” he said. “I can’t say for sure without seeing this girl, but she didn’t do it. The frame’s too obvious and sloppy. I think she was telling the plain truth. She was set up and she just walked into that room like she said. They knew you’d be up, and they knew you’d find her, and the murder weapon, and they knew you’d believe she was crazy. Uh-huh, I see you’re
confused. That’s cause we always look at the victim, why was he killed, who were his enemies, what was he doing in the twenty-four hours before he died and so forth.”
“Boys!” from the house. Barlow opened the screen door.
Paz followed him in. “And…?”
“It ain’t him, it’s her. She was why he was killed. He was just a convenience. They wanted her, not him. Well ain’t this nice!”
The table was spread with food, steaming platters of mashed potatoes oozing butter, chicken-fried steaks the size of hubcaps, chunks of corn bread, enough bean salad to flatulate Orlando. Barlow went to wash up and Paz drew Lorna aside.
“And did you help cook all this?” he asked.
“Oh, right! I was put in a corner like a porcelain doll while Edna did all. She considers herself lucky not to have to castrate bull calves too.”
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