“There is no Mr. Serpu. ‘Serpu’ is how you say the acronym for Strategic Resources Protection Unit. Packer works for them. He’s the last actual government employee before you get to the criminals. He ordered the murder of al-Muwalid and concocted this whole scheme to get Emmylou working for Wilson and framed for the crime, so that…so that…” Paz stumbled. It was hard to keep the mind on all the facets. Perhaps this too, this oily, murky confusion, was part of the plot.
“She would reveal this great secret,” said Lorna in a tired voice. “Which Muwalid was also after and which has to have something to do with oil.”
“You forgot the dope lord’s hidden gold.”
“Oh, right, that too. And there’s the mysterious jade idol and the Nazi diamonds and the missing Rembrandt.” Lorna lay her head back against the seat and looked down at the distant ocean. “It’s so boring. How can people spend their lives this way, plotting and killing and stealing? What’s the win for them? After everything works out perfectly and all the people who need to be dead are dead and the treasure is in the safe, what happens? Nice vacations? Wristwatches? A slightly larger office? A promotion to GS fucking fifteen? What?”
“It’s the oil,” said Paz. “This whole things smells of out-of-control bureaucrats. They’re protecting strategic resources. It’s a dangerous world. The bad guys play rough, and so the good guys have to play rough too. That’s the theory.” Paz thought back to his conversation with Oliphant, and about how easily Oliphant’s passion and outrage had been derailed by the threat of a lost job and pension. He wondered briefly what would derail him from this strange wild-goose chase he was on. Not the job and pension anyway. “It’s just a guy thing, I think. There’re people like that on the cops too. They like to get away with stuff, and they want a small group of players to know it too. Shooting drug dealers and taking their cash, inventing evidence, lying to make a case. They like the wink, they like thinking they’re inside something and everyone else is on the outside looking in. Hell, you’re the psychologist, you explain it. But it has fuck all to do with national security. All that kind of shit is personal.”
Lorna heard what he was saying, and it made sense, but she lacked the energy to follow on with the discussion. What did it matter after all? She squeezed his hand and settled more deeply into her seat. Her head felt hot and she rested against the cool of the glass. She never slept on planes, she was a white-knuckle flier usually, but now she could not keep her eyes open. Yet another upside of dying, she thought as she dropped off.
From Tampa they fly to Atlanta and then to Roanoke, arriving that night and checking into the airport Holiday Inn. She sits on the bed, staring at the floor while he goes out to get some ice, and when he comes back she is in the same position.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and she gives her usual answer, “Nothing.”
He feels her forehead. “It’s not nothing. You’re hot and you’re always tired and you’ve thrown up about ten times since we left Miami.”
“It’s just a flu,” she says. How tedious, she thinks, to be fussed over. She wishes he was a brute, an animal, who saw her merely as a set of warm, slick orifices.
“Do you want to cancel out on the trip? You could crash here while I go.”
“No. I’ll be fine. It’s just some bug.” She hates lying to him. Worse, she now feels too miserable to contemplate sex. Galloping lymphoma. Is there such a thing? She recalls that lymphoma is one of the slower cancers and relatively easy to treat, but she also recalls that there is a wide range of types within both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s. She will have contracted the worst type, or maybe it’s a new type, violently metastasizing, they’ll be amazed at the autopsy, faces will grow pale, oncologists will scurry to their terminals to get the news out, her cells will be preserved for research, she will live forever in tiny tubes all over the world. Someday, maybe, when science advances far enough she will be cloned and wake up on a table in a white laboratory. Of course, she will have superpowers then….
“What’s so funny?” he asks in response to the sound she now makes.
“Oh, just thinking about the peculiar life I seem to be leading.” He mixes drinks, vodka tonics, they click glasses, she looks him in the eye and says, “You’re really nice to me, Jimmy Paz. Is that ‘cause you like me, or are you this way with everyone?”
“I think I’m marginally nicer to you than I am to most people.”
“You don’t seem to have many faults. Is that the case, or are you just good at concealing them?”
“The latter. It’s just because we’ve been working together plus socializing that it hasn’t come up, but when I’m on a case, I mean forget it, I get totally lost. That might be something you should think about. I mean missed dates, no calls for days. Often you might have to take little Jason or Jennifer to soccer when I promised I would. Like that.”
“It’s something to consider,” she says, looking away. “I appreciate being told in advance.” She gulps the rest of her drink. “Excuse me,” she says and goes into the bathroom. She turns the water in the sink on full force and by wrapping her head in the bath towels and lying on the floor with her face jammed into the corner near the tub, she is able to weep hysterical tears for a good long time without Paz the detective detecting anything.
In the early morning they drove south out of Roanoke on 81 with the mountains ghostly on their right hand. He was worried about her. The ravening desire mixed with an obvious debilitation, something he had not experienced before in a partner, but he did not pry. Margarita Paz’s little boy, although a professional detective, had a horror of personal prying.
“This is nice country,” he said after an hour or so of silence. “The Blue Ridge is actually blue. It’s nice to know you can trust something nowadays.”
She looked out the window. “They probably spray it so the tourists don’t complain,” she said, and then gave him a weak smile. Her eyes were red, and he almost confronted her, he almost said, Oh fuck this, Lorna, the next time I see a hospital sign we’re going to the emergency room, but he didn’t. The moment passed and he started playing with the radio.
He had called ahead and explained briefly what they were about, and made an appointment with the prioress at St. Catherine’s. They drove through an ornate iron gate and up a graveled road and parked in a corner of a pleasant quadrangle made by solid bluestone buildings. A group of sisters dressed in blue overalls were playing a vigorous game of volleyball on the lawn behind a large statue. A tiny brown-skinned sister in full habit greeted them solemnly and ushered them up to the office of the prioress, Sr. Marian Dolan.
They were offered seats and coffee. Small talk before the coffee arrived, the pretty country, something about the history and operations of the priory. Sr. Marian talked a little about the background of the Society and then asked, “So, how can we help? You say you’re from the Miami police?”
“I am, Sister. Dr. Wise here is a therapist attending Emily at Jackson Memorial Hospital.”
“She’s mentally ill, is she?”
Lorna said, “Officially she’s remanded by the court to Jackson until she’s fit to answer the indictment against her.”
“This murder of this Sudanese Mr. Paz mentioned on the phone.”
“Yes.” Lorna found she could not bring herself to use the title.
“Is she in fact mad?”
“We’re still determining that.”
“She was prone to visions. Is she still?”
“To an extent,” said Lorna. And drives out demons, she thought, except for the one living in her. She shuddered involuntarily.
A silent young sister brought in a tray and left it. The coffee was in a filter pot, and excellent, as were the madeleines. Paz and Lorna shared a glance over these, which made him feel better than he had in some time.
Sr. Marian said, “I was subprioress at the time, and I had some contact with this person. What exactly did you want to know about her?”
Paz explained: subject o
riginally a suspect in a murder, now not so sure, a conspiracy about some information held by Emily Garigeau, now Emmylou Dideroff; the necessity of tracking down all leads, tracing back along the course of subject’s life.
Sr. Marian’s eyeglasses glinted, reflecting the light from the window so that it was hard to gauge her expression. Paz imagined that the desk and chairs had been set up with just this in mind. He certainly would have done so.
“Well, you seem to know the woman better than we do. She wasn’t here very long and I’m afraid she didn’t make much of an impression. I guess you know this is a training facility, and I guess you know that the Society has a somewhat unusual means of seeking women with vocations. A good number of the women who pass through here are damaged or marginal in some way. Most of them decide the religious life is not for them and they leave here, certainly with no hard feelings on our part. On the other hand we do receive some really remarkable women, very tough, self-reliant, seasoned, the kind other religious foundations would never see. So it evens out, or it has in the past. She came in as a patient. A gunshot wound according to her records, and exposure. We patched her up and she was here for a little over a year, doing routine maintenance. Then she left.”
“Did you know there was a felony warrant out on her?” asked Paz. “I mean you knew she was involved with that drug operation over on Bailey’s Knob, right?”
“Detective, this Society is something like the French Foreign Legion. In fact, our foundress was a keen admirer of that organization. People come here looking for peace and a chance to serve the helpless victims of conflict and we don’t ask questions about their former lives. Obviously, as good citizens we cooperate with the authorities. But certainly no official agency ever served such a warrant on Emily while she was here.”
“Um…Emmylou tells a story about being sent to Sudan,” said Lorna, “of fighting in the civil war there, on behalf of the Dinka tribe. She had the use of some kind of cannon…”
“Well as to that, I’m afraid Emily’s unfortunate background gave her the sort of personality that plays a little fast and loose with the truth. I would be astounded if anything like that actually happened, and, in fact, we have no record of anyone named Emily Garigeau or Emmylou Dideroff serving the Society in Sudan, or anywhere else for that matter. I’m sorry, Detective, and Dr. Wise. I’m afraid you’ve come all this way for very little.”
“I’m sorry for taking your time, Sister,” said Paz, in his best parochial school manner.
They walked out of the building to their car.
Paz said, “You get the impression we’re getting the bum’s rush here?”
“Maybe they know we’re unworthy.”
“No, then they’d be bending over double to be nice. It’s something else. What did you think of the boss lady?”
“Very smart. She managed to seem cooperative and yet convey no real information, while at the same time avoiding actual lies.”
“Yeah. She would be really astounded. I bet she was, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen the way Emmylou said it did.”
“No, but she also could’ve made the whole thing up.”
“Uh-uh,” said Paz. “We got what we came here for. I was worried that Emmylou had manufactured her past totally in her head, but now we know she really was shot on Bailey’s Knob and was here. That woman we just saw was shining us on, and that suggests to me that Emmylou is telling the truth. What is it?”
Lorna had staggered and caught the side of the car for support. She opened the door and sat down.
“You’re sweating,” said Paz.
“It’s hot.”
“It’s not hot, it’s cool. It’s September in the mountains. Why aren’t you telling me what’s wrong with you?”
Lorna was silent. Somewhat to her surprise, she found herself incapable any longer of the lie direct.
He said, “If you tell, I’ll tell you what happened to me at thebembe.”
A long pause. They heard shouts from the volleyball game and the soughing of the wind through the old trees planted on the grounds, horse chestnuts, pin oaks, and pines.
“All right,” she said. “You first.”
“They washed my head,” he said. “Like at a haircut place when you get a shampoo, they sat me in a chair and leaned my head and neck back above the sink. They washed my whole head, though, not just the hair, with something that smelled like coconut. And they were burning something that smoked, incense I guess, the place was filled with smoke, I could barely see what was going on with the smoke and the water in my eyes. And Yemaya and the other two women, Marta and Isabel, were chanting?”
“Yemaya…you mean your mother?”
“I mean Yemaya. The thing was seven feet tall with a voice like a two-hundred-watt woofer. It picked me up like I was a little kid. Anyway, that went on for a while and then they smeared some kind of oil on my head, and the chanting got louder, and then…I realized there were more than the four of us in the room.”
He stopped and had to swallow. She could see sweat beading on his forehead, although the afternoon was growing cool. “What do you mean, more?”
“They came through the smoke. I couldn’t see their faces too good, but I knew who they were. Dodo Cortez and the other one, Moore. The Voodoo Killer. So, the theory is when you kill someone your spirit is tied to theirs and you kind of take on the evil they did in life and carry it. I mean spiritually. And before you can get free you have to experience it, what it means to kill someone, and after you do that they can wash it away. So I did and they did. Oh, the cherry on top was that there’s a demon after me, but it’s got nothing to do with Santeria. Not their department, sorry, and I should be careful. Thank you very much, Emmylou Dideroff. End of story. Now, what’s the matter with you?”
She pretended she hadn’t heard this last. “I don’t understand. You already experienced killing when you shot them.”
“It’s the wrong word, then. Ikilled two human beings. It doesn’t matter that they were a couple of warped sons of bitches, or that they deserved it, or it was self-defense, or any of that legalistic bullshit. The theory is each person is a piece of Olodumare, the creator, and when you kill you disturb the order of heaven and you have to be cleansed. You have to experience the sadness of God. I was crying like a baby and I puked my guts out.”
“But people kill hundreds, thousands even, and it doesn’t seem to bother them. Why did you have to go through all that? It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Santeria isn’t about fair. It’s about balance and walking with the saints. Christ, Lorna! Do you think Icomprehend what the fuck is going on here? What my mother is up to with me? I just keep my head down and do what I’m told. And it works. I felt clean and I still feel clean. Except for the occasional demonic attack, there’s less buzzing shit in my head. Things look brighter, I mean things in the world, like those flowers.” He pointed to a bush of hydrangeas. “And your eyes.” He stared into these. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”
“I’m dying of cancer.”
His face contorted into that ridiculous monkey expression we all wear, with the semismile, when we have heard impossibly bad news. “What do you mean you’re dying of cancer? When were you diagnosed?”
“I haven’t been yet. But I have all the classic symptoms of lymphoma.”
“Oh, please! What is this, the do-it-yourself school of cancer research? Lorna, they have machines now, microscopes, chemicals, whatever….”
“But I know. Iknow, Jimmy. My grandmother died of cancer, my mother died of cancer, and now it’s my turn. I have enlarged lymph nodes, sweats, weakness, weight loss, skin itching. I feel nauseated all the time, which means it’s really locked in there, it’s spread to my internal organs, maybe even the pancreas.”
Paz cursed in Spanish under his breath and hung his head like a boxer who’s taken one hit too many. Time slowed down a little in the car; even the wind seemed to die. He asked, “How long has this been going on?”
“I don�
��t know. Months maybe, but I’ve been in denial about it. It got so obvious recently that I couldn’t do that anymore.”
Paz started the car and tore down the priory drive in a spray of gravel. He was surprised at himself. He was usually a really focused guy, he prided himself on it, in fact, and the other parts of his life he kept in neat pockets?life as a fishing vest, a tackle box. He was on a case now, certainly the most difficult case of his career, with no backup, with no support above him, confronting forces of unknown dimension, not all of them in the material world, but certainly malign, and nothing else should have mattered very much. But now he found that this did matter, Lorna being sick, and it occurred to him as he barreled along the mountain roads that this was a real difference. He told himself he hardly knew the woman, sad sure if she was dying, but people die, and anyway the whole thing was a rebound from Willa, he needed something and she was it. Sorry, so sorry and good-bye. No! He caught that line of thought and strangled it in its cradle. And then he broke the speed limit more than he usually did driving to Roanoke, and bullied her into going to the emergency room, and he completely abandoned the tempo of his investigation to sit in waiting rooms in hospitals in Roanoke and then Washington while they looked at her and he pretended to be her husband and got in the faces of doctors and nurses to ensure that they treated her like a human person and not a diseased lump of meat.
Lorna wonders why he’s doing this. She wonders why she has relaxed so entirely into the hands of a man she hardly knows, why her will, which she had thought was of steel, has proved in these last weeks to be taffy. She allows him to move her around like a mannequin, she submits to the probing and questionings and procedures, although previously she would never have allowed a doc to touch her without the most elaborate investigation of her background and record. It is very strange, and in a peculiar way, it contents her. She has never allowed strangeness to enter her life, and now she is with this strange man, who lights up her (unfortunately dying) body as it has not ever been lit up before, who defies her lifelong understanding of what a suitable mate ought to be, who participates in voodoo, sorry, Santeria, and kills people. From time to time she finds a foolish grin arriving on her face, startling the oncology nurses. The tests take a good long time, days and days. She is in the hospital, the hypochondriac’s wet dream, but she finds she has become passive about the practice of medicine on her body. Paz will take care of everything. He is in and out, seeing people in Washington offices. He tells her things he’s learned, things he suspects. There really is an outfit called SRPU, it’s part of the Department of Homeland Security, and they never heard of Floyd Mitchell or David Packer and they really can’t tell him anything else, he doesn’t have the clearances.
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