Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  The American’s jiggling earnestness, his ceaseless talk, had irritated them all but in truth the American had meant no harm and done none, except to their nerves. Cielo thought, I had better light candles for him.

  He’d already reprimanded Emil harshly but beyond that did it matter? It wasn’t Emil’s fault that nobody had told him the whole exercise was a sham, a bit of theater, a command performance for the entertainment of old man Draga. Emil, in committing them to the irrevocability of their course, had merely shown that he believed it wasn’t a lark; it was war. Well it was war only in Draga’s withered mind but Emil didn’t know that because there was no way for anyone to explain it to him. And maybe Emil was right. You had to do this sort of thing believing in it; otherwise you were worse than a fool.

  Emil had served in the American Army toward the end of the Viet Nam absurdity; there he had learned to kill dispassionately and casually. Perhaps he had murdered the American boy to remind his older companions of what he thought they were up to. Cielo remembered the sullen contempt in Emil’s eyes when he’d admonished them beforehand. There’s to be no killing.

  Such a stupid farce, he thought. The old man would have done better to entrust his job to Emil. For purposes of revolution you needed kids. People too young to have grown inhibitions.

  Cielo fingered the submachine gun again. At least he could finish the job; that much he could do. Get the money back to Draga and make sure it wasn’t hijacked along the way by outsiders. But one thing was sure. No more hostages were going to be murdered. He’d shoot Emil before he’d let him kill another innocent.

  The others in the room came forward slowly, sweeping the walls and the cot frames with damp toweling, preparing to quit the hut. Cielo drew back the cuff of his fatigue jacket to examine his watch. Just right. Any minute now the rain would begin and daylight would drain away. Soon they’d be on the river bound for the sea. Ghosts in a rainy night; no one would catch them now.

  Chapter 5

  When Carole emerged into the steamy Houston heat there was a ravening mob of journalists on the concrete steps and Howard took her arm, leading the way, trying to drive a wedge through them. Strobes half-blinded her and there was the flicker of lenses. One of the bayonet microphones almost took her jaw off. The reporters were all talking at once and she couldn’t understand a word; she cringed, shaded her eyes, got behind Howard and pressed forward, using him as a ram. “Get me out of this.”

  Can you tell us how it feels.… Have you been told if anything has been learned.… What sort of boy was he.… Your reaction to the Venezuelan delay that may have cost your son his life.… How does it feel?

  She screamed. “You fucking hyenas!” knowing the obscenity would render their films and recordings useless.

  Howard was booming calmly, “Give us a break, this is no time.…” His voice was lost in the babble.

  He fed her into the car; she punched the lock button down and stared ahead stonily. Like slavering kids at a candy store window they pressed up against the windshield. She held herself rigid. Flashbulbs exploded. One of the reporters stumbled against the car, making it rock. Howard fought his way around and squeezed into the driver’s seat. When he turned the key in the ignition she said, “Run them down.”

  “Take it easy. We’ll be out of this in a minute.” He gunned the engine in neutral, making a noise. It drove the pack into retreat and he pulled it gently away from the curb. When she looked back she saw the red light still winking above a TV camera’s zoom lens. Then they were around the corner and she slumped. “Ghouls.”

  “I know. I know.” He pulled up at a red light. “Look, we’d better drive up to Beaumont and catch a plane there. They might be covering the airport here.”

  “You go ahead. Drop me by a taxi. I’ll check into a motel.”

  “What’s the point of hanging on here?”

  “I’m going to wait and fly back to Virginia with the body when they’re finished with it.”

  “That’s morbid.”

  “One of us has to do it.”

  “They’ll send it on. We’ve got to get back to Alexandria—the funeral arrangements have to be made.…”

  “You go ahead then.”

  “It’s something else, isn’t it?”

  She said, “In all the madness I didn’t really get a chance to talk to that Marine.”

  “You won’t get a crack at him for weeks, Carole. He’ll be closeted in debriefing sessions with the others. They won’t let him talk to outsiders until they’ve squeezed him dry—they may not even let him talk afterward.”

  “I have to know,” she said.

  “There’s a better chance of that in Washington than there is here. At least we may be able to squeeze some information out of O’Hillary.”

  “There’s a taxi. Pull over.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “If you’re determined I’ll take you to a hotel. Any preference?”

  “I’ve never been in Houston in my life. How do I know?”

  The car’s air conditioner blew a dry chill against her face. The street was a wide boulevard lined with structures that looked tentative and temporary; it might have been Los Angeles. Traffic endlessly streaming. Life goes on, she thought with bitter banality.

  At the first motor hotel she said, “That one will do,” not caring; Howard pulled in under the porte-cochere and opened the trunk to get out her overnight bag. The heat was close and depressingly heavy.

  By the room, key in hand, she said, “Go ahead. I’ll be all right. I’ve got phone calls to make.” She opened it and pushed inside.

  “I don’t like leaving you just now.”

  She turned, lurching; walked blindly toward a door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The bathroom,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”

  “Don’t go. Stay here.”

  “Howard, I’m going to make a fool of myself and cry.”

  “Fine. I’d rather you cried here with me than by yourself in there.”

  She sat down. “I’m sorry to be such a fool. I’ll get over it in a minute.”

  “Suppose I stay on a while. I can take a late-night flight. Let’s have dinner before I go.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve just remembered I have a terrible headache.”

  He pressed his hands together until she heard the knuckles crack. “I wish I knew what to do for you.”

  “Nothing. I’ll be all right. You can depart with a clear conscience.”

  “Please don’t be like that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was too exhausted to argue.

  “Look, if there’s anything—”

  “The fact is right now at the moment I’m unable to meet the emotional demands of this and I need to be left alone to collect myself. If you stay much longer we’ll start degrading each other.”

  After he left she went to the window and watched his car until he got into it and drove away into the traffic. Failing to collect her thoughts she attempted to rest but her eyes wouldn’t stay shut and finally she made a number of phone calls trying to arrange a meeting with the Marine but everything was shut to her.

  Then she had a half-formed idea. There’d been a dimly familiar face in that mob of journalists on the steps. She went back to the phone. It required three calls. One to Los Angeles Information; armed with the number she called the L.A. paper; armed by the Examiner with a Houston number she called Dwiggins’ hotel.

  Dwiggins arrived in something under twenty minutes and gave her a baffled smile.

  “Come in,” she said, “I’m unarmed.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I want something from you.”

  “Quid pro quo?”

  “Yes. You can have an interview if you think it’s worth it.”

  “You’re front-page copy right now. Celebrity mother of terrorist victim.” He came in but seemed hesitant about shutting the door. She made a vague gesture and he closed it and crossed gingerly to a chair where
he sat up on the edge like an expectant pupil.

  Dwiggins was fortyish and quite fat, his hair prematurely white and wispy; he had a journalistically bibulous nose and wry eyes that had seen everything.

  She said, “I noticed you in that lynch mob but it didn’t register until afterward.”

  “I’m flattered you remember me at all.”

  “Your column on me wasn’t particularly friendly, as I recall—something about me being the apostate leader of a new wave of sentimentality and cornball trash—but you did me the extraordinary courtesy of printing what I’d actually said in the interview. I find that unique.”

  He dipped his head an inch. “Thank you.”

  “Are you also old-fashioned enough to honor an agreement to keep something off the record?”

  “If the agreement is made beforehand. I won’t print anything without your permission.”

  “You won’t even discuss it among your friends. Fair enough?”

  “All right. But—”

  “The quid pro quo, I know. I’ll give you an interview you can print. This is something else.”

  Dwiggins acceded with a dip of his broad face.

  “I’ll make it as painless for you as possible.” She nodded toward the tape recorder, granting permission. “You want to know how I feel about the death of my son. I feel every which way—like a kaleidoscope. Right at this moment I have an acute desire never to feel anything again.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sure you don’t need remarks from me about the senselessness of this tragedy. Of course it’s arbitrary, it’s a grisly waste of a brilliant human life, it’s pointless and maddening.”

  He said quietly, “Have you cried much?”

  “Yes, I have tears but I don’t let them blur my vision. Mainly right now I feel rage. I want revenge, you see. I can’t help it, I can’t rationalize it away. It’s intensely personal and I’m sure that’s a useless response to such an impersonal attack but that’s how I feel. I want these terrorists punished.”

  “Brought to justice.”

  “Justice,” she said, “doesn’t come into it. I’m talking about emotions now. Justice is an abstract concept.” She made a loose fist and contemplated it; she looked up at the reporter. “I want to be there, physically present, the day these animals are destroyed. I’ll get satisfaction from it—I know, nothing can bring my son back. But all the same. It’s what I feel.”

  Dwiggins said, “Tell me about Robert.”

  At one point he stopped her to flip the tape cassette over to Side Two. They kept talking and it was unreal to her: Two people conversing normally as if the world still were the same as it had been a week ago. She tried to be candid and articulate. She tried to listen carefully to his questions and respond appropriately. But the words—both Dwiggins’ and her own—broke up in her mind. Half the time she was not aware of what she was saying, although a canny part of her mind kept hold of the secrets that had to remain off the tape and off the record; she talked automatically but not carelessly.

  When the tape was finished Carole said, “Thank you. You could have made it much harder for me.”

  “I promise you there won’t be any snide asides about cornball trash.” He had relaxed during the interview, slumping back in the chair, crossing his legs, watching her amiably while she spoke. He was not a threatening figure. She sensed a great deal of sadness in him but had no clue to its source.

  She asked if he wanted to drink and he declined, surprising her. “I’m a bit of a lush,” he confided, “but I keep it under control and I don’t drink when I’m working.”

  “Do you mind if I have one?”

  “Not at all.”

  It was a two-ounce screw-top bottle of Scotch she’d dropped in her handbag on the airplane. She sucked it straight from the nipple of the bottle. “We go off the record now,” she said. “All the way off the record. This is exclusively between you and me and it goes no farther.”

  “Fair enough. What do you want me to do?”

  “Did you ever know my brother?”

  “Warren Marchand? No, not personally. I admired his work a great deal. He was a hell of a writer.”

  “I thought you might have known him. That series you did for the Examiner about the CIA mercenaries in the Montagnard country.”

  “That was years ago. I’m astonished you’d remember it.”

  “I remember it because it was the kind of thing my brother would have done.”

  “I take that as a considerable compliment.”

  “It was meant as one,” she said. “Is that the only time you’ve departed from your usual Hollywood beat?”

  “No. I did a series on the Alaska pipeline a few years ago. And I was in Angola a while during that mess. I covered the aftermath of the Allende assassination in Chile, too. Once in a while I ask for a hard-news assignment. It reminds me of the real world out there beyond the tinsel.”

  “Do you still keep in touch with any of the people you interviewed on those stories?”

  “Which people?”

  “Mercenaries.”

  His eyelids dropped; he gave her a long scrutiny before he replied. “This is hardly the century for that kind of romantic gesture, you know.”

  “Maybe it’s a good idea whose time has come back. I’m descended from good solid Norman stock. People whose record of violence and rapacity would make Caligula look like Shirley Temple. If you look at it that way it would be completely out of character for me to sit by and do nothing in the face of this—this, what can I call it? Obscenity? Affront?”

  “You’re being irrational, you know.”

  “Of course I am. If God had wanted us to be entirely reasonable he’d have made us in the image of a Univac computer.”

  Dwiggins said, “Forgive me if I pick this up as if it were ticking.”

  “It won’t be any risk for you, whatever happens.”

  “I don’t want to be the one to send you into the jungle.”

  “You’re a good guy, Dwiggins.”

  He said, “What do you know about terrorists?”

  “Not much.”

  “I’ve made a few observations over the years. Want to hear them?”

  “Certainly.”

  “The terrorist is a juvenile delinquent, whatever his age. He’s not much different from a kid who gets into drugs or joins the Moonies or makes his bedroom into a shrine to some rock group. Does that surprise you? He senses misplaced feelings all around him, and inside him. The terrorist can’t stand the idea of being an ordinary person like anybody else. And he can’t stand the idea that ordinary people may actually enjoy their lives. In a sense he has an amazing affinity for the banal—violence, I think, is one of the stupidest but most natural responses to frustration, and what’s the real difference between terrorism and football? The problem isn’t terrorists, the problem’s the world that creates them. When things get so big and complex and impersonal that no individual feels he can affect anything around him, he becomes sullen and apathetic and he resents his impotence and sooner or later he explodes. One way or another. We all have our own private explosions. We’re all caught up in the obsession with novelty—marching to ever new tunes, excited by ever new fads of salvation—astrology, drugs, gurus, revolutions. One man’s ‘est’ is another man’s terrorism. Do you see what I’m saying to you? I think you seem to have managed to convince yourself that the people who killed your boy aren’t human. It’s the key psychosis of warfare. The enemy isn’t human because he’s the enemy.”

  “Dwiggins,” she said with a tight little smile, “you can take your social theories and wrap them in sandpaper and shove them all the way up.”

  He professed not to hear her. “I’m not excusing them. God knows they’re more to be censured than pitied. But look, when children drop and smash their toys you don’t murder them, you just clean up the mess as best you can.”

  “These are not infants. They’re responsible for their acts.”

  Dwiggins sig
hed. “You’re convinced they’re not going to be apprehended?”

  “I have no doubt of it.”

  “You may be right. If they’re half clever they’ll stay out of reach until the world loses interest in them. There won’t be any extended outcry for their capture. The people—including politicians—the people get exercised but they never get concerned. The voice of the people is mainly an indifferent groan.”

  She let him run on. He was talking himself into it; she didn’t need to prompt him.

  He made a last-ditch effort at resistance. “You don’t like to feel that you’re an ordinary person who can be pushed around by these events. That’s something you have in common with the terrorists—your motives aren’t much different from theirs and now you’re proposing to use their methods, too. Does that leave any difference between you and them?”

  “I never aspired to the sainthood.”

  “It’s a kamikaze idea.” Dwiggins’ elbows were on his knees. He exposed his palms to her. “You are nuts, you know that?”

  “I grant the possibility.”

  “Certifiable,” he said. “It costs money, I expect, and nobody could make any promises.”

  “I know. I have some money and I don’t expect promises.”

  He said, “I want to cover this story.”

  “Let’s see how it works out first. I may let you know how things go. Then again—”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I did you a favor,” she told him, “and I asked you one in return. If you want to renege I’ll try someone else, but—”