“You must be mistaken.”
Never had I seen him so giddy. “They work for those magazines you’re so fond of.”
“What magazines?”
M. Gadds folded his arms across his chest, his lips pursed with condescension. “The ones you keep in your office.”
“I keep them for the guests.”
“In that case,” he said, “perhaps you should consider putting them in the library, where the guests will be more likely to find them.”
At that moment, two of our guests were passing through the lobby—a foreign businessman and his wife—and I turned to greet them.
“If this is true,” I said once the couple was gone, “we have to stop them.”
M. Gadds was already turning to leave. “This isn’t your concern. Security of the hotel is my responsibility. Your job is to change the lightbulbs.”
I should not have been surprised that Mlle Miller’s visit brought out the worst in him. I had long ago observed this tendency, that his insults grew in direct proportion to the importance of whoever happened to be around. The presence of Madame made him cruel. The presence of a well-known musician made him unbearable. The presence of a world-famous actress made him intolerable. It did not seem to matter that I was usually the only direct witness to these displays. The satisfaction he found in being so unpleasant would likely have been the same with no audience at all. What point would there have been even trying to deprive him of this pleasure? Besides, it was easy to see that it all came down to simple jealousy. He knew it was me Mme Freeman looked to first, my opinions she sought out, not his.
In the days following the young woman’s arrival, I was so busy I very nearly managed to forget she was here. The first time I went down to Mlle Miller’s villas to check on her pool, she was already several days into her stay. It was a little after noon and a collection of deck chairs lay in the sun, but there was no sign anyone had recently been using them. I supposed Mlle Miller had gone to the manor house for lunch.
The pump’s motor had gotten neither better nor worse. It was impossible to say if it would survive until its replacement arrived. Resigning myself to returning the next day to check on it again, I closed the shed door behind me.
Over the moan of the engine, I had failed to hear her coming, and I was caught by surprise when I stepped outside and found the young woman standing alone at the edge of the pool, staring at the placid water, her right arm weighed down by a tumbler filled with an amber liquid.
Outside of a magazine, it was the first time I had ever seen her. Mlle Miller looked older than I had expected, and yet somehow younger too. Her face was both dull—as if worn down by age and the elements—and also soft and gently chubby, like a child edging toward adulthood. Hair more brown than blond, it failed to absorb the sunlight swelling on the cement at her bare feet. She was as tall as I had supposed, and thin, her open bathrobe revealing a slim figure in a two-piece swimsuit—green with white spots. I would still have called her pretty, but I sensed she would take no pleasure in such a compliment.
“There’s no beach,” she said, her voice so soft and quiet I was scarcely sure I heard it. I realized belatedly that she was talking to me.
“Pardon me?”
“There’s no beach here. I expected there to be a beach.”
“It’s not far.” Thanks to the new roads President Duphay was building all across the island, everything was closer than it used to be. “Just twenty minutes.”
She turned to look at me, the ice clinking in her glass. There was about her a sadness I would never have guessed someone so famous and successful could feel.
“Is it pretty?” she asked.
“Beautiful.”
“I’d like to go there.”
“Of course.” Suddenly aware of the grease on my fingers, I folded my hands together behind my back. “There’s a car at your disposal. The concierge at the manor house will be glad to arrange it.” I turned to start back up the path.
“It’s a long walk,” she said to my back, “and I’m not really dressed.” She sounded tired, and I found myself feeling sorry for her, this young woman of whom so much was demanded, for whom simple rest away from the eyes of the world was impossible.
“I’m on my way up there myself,” I said. “I’ll make the arrangements. Your car and driver will be waiting.”
The wings of her nose wrinkled when she smiled. She was once again the breathtaking young beauty from the magazine. “You’re very kind.”
Sitting with his back to the tree, the tall man looked up from his companion’s cards when he saw me coming. It had been days since I had last spoken to them, and it appeared they had not moved.
“Any luck with the birds?” I said.
The tall man threw down a card. “They’re very quick.”
“Elusive,” said the short man as he regarded his hand and his companion’s discard with disappointment.
“I thought you might be interested in something I saw.”
The short one barely glanced at me over the tops of his cards. “What’s that?”
“Something very rare,” I said slowly, enticingly. “It had a bright red belly and a long blue tail and I think its back was green. I thought you might want to come in and take a look.”
“You mean in there?” The short one pointed past the gate.
“We should hurry,” I said, waving them on. “Before it gets away.”
The two men dashed into each other as they rose, and I could hear them whispering as they rustled through their bags. When they were ready, the short one went around to the far side of the tree.
“Come on,” he said. He bent over, and when he came back up again he was dragging along the limp body of the third man, a gaunt figure with gray skin and yellow eyes circled by steel washers. The third man staggered forward as though both legs had fallen asleep, his clothes wrinkled and twisted around him like a candy wrapper.
“Lead the way,” the tall man said.
I stepped aside to let them through the gate.
Once the sick man got moving, momentum seemed to take over, for he quickly outpaced his companions. Down the drive we went. As we neared the manor house, I could see the three of them looking at the car waiting out front. Mlle Miller’s driver sat on the hood, smoking.
“This way,” I said, and the three men followed me down a path away from the drive. Soon we were behind the manor house, winding our way among the outbuildings. It was brutally hot, even in the shade, and the men were growing tired. We passed the garage and the stables, and we lingered several minutes by the laundry while I made a show of trying to remember where I had seen the bird.
“I think it was this way,” I said, and I led the men beyond the maids’ quarters and the storerooms. By now perhaps twenty minutes had passed. The sick man had grown wobbly.
“Maybe we should try that direction,” the short one said, pointing back toward the manor house.
“It must have flown away,” I said, feigning disappointment.
The tall one mopped up his forehead with his sleeve. “Right.”
So we turned around, following the same route back. I apologized again. Behind me the short man and the tall man grumbled, while the sick man struggled to keep up, and just as we were about to reach the drive, I spotted Mlle Miller’s car up above us, closing in on the gate. The men were too far back to have seen her.
“Look!” I stopped just in time and pointed up into the trees. As the three men raised their heads, Mlle Miller’s car cleared the gate.
“Never mind,” I said, relieved that we could finally bring the game to a close. “I guess it was nothing.”
I continued up the path, and the short man and the tall man followed, but the sick man remained where he was, head thrown back at the trees above him.
“I see it,” he said, pointing toward the sky.
There, in the crook of a giant locust tree, preening its black-and-white barred wings with its yellow bill, sat a small bird with a red
belly and blue tail. It was beautiful, like nothing I had ever seen. Was it possible, I briefly wondered, for four people to share the same hallucination?
The sick man raised his camera and clicked a shot. “It’s splendid.”
Speechless, I barely managed to nod.
“I knew you would like it,” I finally thought to say.
Although she insisted it was true, I found it hard to believe that Madame’s long-overdue return just happened to coincide with Mlle Miller’s visit. Who could blame her for being starstruck?
That night I arrived at the restaurant to find Madame in the dining room going from table to table, greeting her guests with an uncharacteristically distracted air. In a glance, I noticed Mlle Miller was missing, and I feared Madame was growing impatient at the continued absence of her most famous visitor.
At the other end of the restaurant, glowering beside the swinging doors to the kitchen, stood M. Gadds. Seeing me come in, he gave me one of his testy waves, ordering me over as he disappeared inside.
When I reached the kitchen, he was standing beside the walk-in refrigerator with his arms crossed, his reddened face seemingly radiating as much heat as an oven.
With a pinch he grabbed my arm. “Where have you been?”
“Working,” I said.
We went up the back stairs to his office. For a moment after closing the door behind us, he stood behind his desk with his back to me, staring out the window.
“Sit,” he said.
“I don’t wish to sit.”
When he turned around, his face was swollen with rage.
Leaning forward, he planted his hands on the leather blotter. “Did you arrange for Mlle Miller to go to the beach?”
“She asked—” I began, but M. Gadds cut me off to interject, “How many times have we talked about this?”
“I was only trying to help,” I said.
“We don’t need your help.”
I knew nothing could be further from the truth. “She asked for my help.”
“How many times have I told you to leave the guests to me? It couldn’t be any more simple. You get the toilets. I get the people.”
I turned to leave. “You cannot talk to me this way.”
“Her car was stopped,” M. Gadds said. “At gunpoint,” he added for emphasis. “Mlle Miller was taken from the car, terrorized, and made to pay a toll.”
He appeared to enjoy the silence that followed.
I lowered myself into the chair. “Does Madame know?”
“I tried to explain to Mlle Miller that it was all a misunderstanding,” M. Gadds said, continuing to stand.
“How is she?”
“She is packing.” M. Gadds picked up the phone and dialed the front desk. I heard him tell the clerk to fetch Madame from the dining room.
“How was I to know?”
“You’re not,” he said. “That’s why we have a concierge.”
The wait, which we passed in silence, was interminable. When Madame finally arrived, she entered without knocking, and it was clear as she regarded the two of us that she was not happy to have been interrupted.
“What is so important?”
I had to endure another telling of the story. M. Gadds was careful at every opportunity to stress my involvement, and I did not try to protest, knowing it would only make matters worse.
“Were they security forces?” Madame said, “or some sort of bandits?”
“I don’t know,” M. Gadds said, at which Madame snapped irritably, “Well, find out!”
While M. Gadds was on the phone, locating the driver and ordering him to come up that instant, I heard Madame grumble, “He promised me nothing like this would ever happen.”
But it was unclear whether Madame was talking to me or to herself, and I was afraid to ask to whom she was referring.
The driver was out of breath when he reached us, and he looked terrified even before M. Gadds began to speak.
“Tell us who the men were,” M. Gadds ordered, motioning for him to sit. “You’ve done nothing wrong. Tell us what they looked like.”
The man slowly lowered himself into the seat, just as I had a moment before, looking nervously from one of us to the next.
Madame leaned in closer. “What did they wear? Did they wear khakis and sunglasses? Were they the president’s men?”
He nodded hesitantly.
With a smile to show him he had done well, Madame thanked and dismissed him.
As soon as he was gone, she stood, her face contorted with fury.
“This cannot be permitted.” Her voice carried a disturbingly false note of calm. She was careful not to slam the door as she left.
During the next two hours, as I waited for Madame to emerge from her office, I tried to contemplate what might happen. I would be fired—that much was clear. I had always thought that to be my worst fear, but now that it was upon me, I realized what worried me more was what this might mean for the hotel. As M. Gadds said, once word of what had happened got out, we would be ruined. And I thought of the photographers outside the gate, who must have been there when Mlle Miller returned. I could imagine the story that would appear in the magazines, with photos of the terrified young beauty dramatizing her ordeal. After all our struggles, all our effort, could we be undone by something like this?
It was late and I was pacing on my balcony when I first heard and then saw the black car come speeding down the drive. Directly below me, it came to a screeching stop. Out of the back stepped a man in a dark suit and a narrow-brimmed hat. At the bottom of the broad stone steps he paused, reaching toward his throat to adjust his tie.
With my ear to my office door, I heard a phone ring—the front desk calling up to Madame’s office. And then, a minute later, came the footsteps, two sets, as the desk clerk led the man in the narrow-brimmed hat to Madame’s door. He went inside, and the other set of footsteps trailed away back downstairs.
I tried to guess who the man might be, but it was impossible to know. He might have been someone the president had sent, or maybe someone from the embassy.
After half an hour, I could no longer wait. I knocked on M. Gadds’s door. He was out. I went downstairs, hoping he might be at the front desk, but he was not there either, and neither was the clerk. The porter who was temporarily covering for him did not know where they were.
“Did they say anything about the man who came to see Madame?”
“No,” he said, and then he nodded past my shoulder. “But you could ask her yourself.”
Descending the stairs in matching steps, both of their mouths molded into polite smiles, were Mme Freeman and Senator Marcus’s old friend, the minister of health. The sight was so strange, these two pieces so puzzlingly placed together, I could only stare.
At the bottom, before separating, Madame and the minister of health shared a few quiet words and then shook hands, and I watched the minister of health return to the car waiting below.
“It’s going to be okay,” Mme Freeman said once he was gone.
“That was the minister of health,” I said.
“Of course not,” she said. “That was the minister of tourism.”
I was taken aback. “I wasn’t aware we had one.”
“We do now.” And then she wished me good night.
Chapter Fifteen
As far as we could tell, the incident did not appear in any of the papers or magazines. Madame had people keeping an eye on them in the States. I was careful to peruse everything I found lying about the manor house. Within days of her return home, Mlle Miller’s photo resumed appearing in the weeklies, but the captions never said anything about us. There on those glossy pages, the young actress was her radiant self again. It was hard to believe any misfortune had ever been visited upon her.
Despite the promises of the minister of tourism, for the next several weeks we were cautious, discouraging guests from excursions beyond the gate. It seemed we were not the only ones complaining about incidents involving the security for
ces. For an organization supposedly disbanded, they suddenly appeared to be everywhere. The president denied it, going so far as to make a televised speech assuring us it was not so.
“We are experiencing the greatest peace and prosperity we have had in decades,” he said. “Let us not jeopardize this with irresponsible and upsetting rumors.”
The next day, a reporter thought to be a source of some of these rumors went missing.
Having been forced to close our guests off from the rest of the island, we had to do what we could to bring the island to them. In addition to the usual evening performances at the pavilion, we hired a rotation of bands to play all day long. The estate began to feel as though it were in the midst of a party that never ceased.
At M. Gadds’s suggestion, around lunchtime each day craftswomen from the Cité Verd market came and spread their beadwork purses and hand-carved wooden icons on blankets around the manor house pool. Anything our guests wished to buy we added directly to their bills.
Yet however much we tried, it was impossible to keep the troubles outside from sometimes seeping in, especially as those troubles began to spill beyond the island’s shores. Food shortages resulting from the drought persisted. For reasons as numerous as they were intractable, the economy was in collapse.
In the middle of May, just as tourist season was beginning to pick up again, stories started to surface in the foreign press about coast guard vessels intercepting refugees fleeing the island in homemade dinghies.
“Boat people,” one of the articles quipped, had “become the island’s main export.”
With each new article, we received more cancellations.
One morning a few weeks later, at our bench in the preserve, I shared my concerns with Madame. As her most trusted confidant, what choice did I have but once again to be the one to deliver the difficult news?
“If this doesn’t stop soon,” I said, more bluntly than I ever had before, “I don’t know how much longer we can survive.”
“I know,” she said. Never had she sounded so defeated.
“Have you spoken with M. Rossignol?”
The Boiling Season Page 20