The Boiling Season

by Christopher Hebert

  The photographers all wore the same vest, upon which there were as many pockets as teeth on a zipper. Their cameras clicked and clicked and clicked.

  Off to the side stood the boys I had seen manning the barricade the day before. They were watching over the scene, as if supervising. Their weapons sat in a harmless pile in the grass. Every last one of them dangled a lit cigarette between his lips. I was no stranger to the scent of foreign tobacco.

  As if we had gathered here for a cocktail party, the gap-toothed boy sauntered over.

  “You missed him.” The boy blew a disintegrating thread of smoke through his teeth. “Hector was here all night, just like I told you.”

  “You’re mistaken,” I said. “You must be thinking of another Hector.”

  The photographers continued to bend over the body.

  I had to look away. “Mine could not have had anything to do with this.”

  The boy took a long drag on his cigarette, staring at me blankly, as if inhaling required every last scrap of his concentration. Then he chuckled, coughing up clouds of smoke. “Maybe you don’t know him like you think you do,” he said as he walked away to join his friends. “Makes no difference to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  As I should have guessed, among the followers Dragon Guy brought with him when he returned was Hector.

  For me the night of their arrival was long and sleepless. I passed the hours on the balcony, listening to the voices and the movement down below. I saw curious shadows rising up the stairs beside the guesthouse, looking around, and then descending again. I could not tell how many there were, but the procession seemed endless. One after another they came. There was a peculiar orderliness about it, as if they had bought tickets and queued up for their turn. Everyone seemed to understand they could approach no closer than the drive; it was the velvet rope, and the manor house the priceless piece of art.

  To my own surprise, I felt oddly at peace. It was as if I had known all along that this was coming. I did not welcome them—even as I watched them cycle up and down the stairs, I already understood I would have to do everything I could to make them leave. But the struggle itself and their appearance here produced in me a calming sense of the inevitable.

  The next morning, Hector appeared at my office door, and by the way his eyes refused to meet mine I could tell he had not volunteered to come see me.

  “Why, Hector?” I said. “Why would you do this?” But even as the words left my mouth, I understood this was not the same boy I had so recently invited here.

  The differences were apparent everywhere on his body, from the new tears in his jersey to the rounding of his shoulders, which seemed burdened with fatigue and responsibility. He must have noticed I was tired too.

  “We’ll be using the villas,” he said. He was trying to sound forceful, but he came off hoarse and uncertain. It had been less than two years since I had pulled him in off the street, and I nearly felt bad for him, this boy suddenly compelled to be a man.

  “Which villas?” I said, already preparing for the worst.

  “All of them.”

  “Not Madame’s . . .”

  For the first time, his eyes met mine. They contained in them something I had never seen there before. He might have called it strength and determination. To me it looked like desperation.

  “All of them.”

  “What about your lessons? Everything was going so well.” I took a step toward him, and he took a step back. “There’s still so much for you to learn.”

  “What’s the point?” He knotted his arms across his chest. “What good would it do me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What good has it ever done you?”

  “It’s given me a better life.”

  His eyes were full of pity. “You’re just a servant.”

  “But you,” I said, “you could be so much more.”

  He had already turned his back to me.

  “He will destroy it, Hector,” I said. “Your brother will destroy everything. You’re not like him.”

  Hector opened the door, but instead of passing through, he paused on the threshold, still holding on to the knob, as if he needed its cold support. “It’ll be destroyed either way.”

  And then the door was slowly swinging closed. “What about Raoul?” I said.

  “He’s with us.”

  It took me several tries, pushing and pulling on the heavy steel handle, before I realized the door to the kitchen was locked. Until then I had been unaware the door even possessed a lock.

  “Mona!” I yelled.

  “Who is it?” she said, softly but urgently from what sounded like a position just on the other side of the wall.

  “Me.”

  “How do I know it’s you?”

  “Because you can hear my voice.”

  I heard rustling on the other side. “I need proof,” she said.

  After the events of the morning I had little patience for this. “Let me in,” I demanded, pounding my fist against the door.

  “Name the villas,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The villas all have names,” she said. “What are they?”

  “There are forty of them,” I said, hammering now with both fists. “You want me to name them all?”

  “Forty-four,” she corrected.

  “Villa Bardot,” I began with a sigh. “Villa Bernhardt, Villa Bacall, Villa Garbo . . .”

  I started with the villas closest to the manor house and moved on from there. I had named perhaps twenty of them when I finally heard a heavy scraping and then the door swung open. Before I had a chance to step forward, Mona had reached out and grabbed my arm. She pulled me in, and as I passed the threshold I saw in her other hand a hefty steel bar, which she immediately heaved back into place.

  Inside, the kitchen was even darker than usual, the only light filtering down from the small dusty windows in the ceiling. Buckets quivering with water crowded an entire counter. On the tables and in a corner of the floor Mona had stacked and stuffed everything we normally stored in the pantry: sacks of beans and corn and rice and sweet potatoes.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “I told you this would happen,” she said as she returned to whatever she had been doing. “But you knew better. You didn’t listen.”

  “What did you want me to do?”

  She shrugged, exaggerating her sense of defeat. “It’s too late now.”

  “I didn’t ask them to come.”

  “You didn’t tell them not to.”

  “How was I supposed—”

  “If you want them to stay,” she interrupted, pointing to me—as if there might be some confusion as to whom she was speaking—“that’s your choice. But I’m not going to feed them.”

  “Did they come looking for food?”

  “Let them try.” From a nail on the lattice where all of her utensils hung, Mona selected a heavy knife. “They won’t get a grain of millet from me,” she said, halving an eggplant with a single blow.

  Across the room I saw several small, twitchy shadows scratching along the floor, pecking at something. She had brought even the chickens inside.

  “Not a pinch of flour,” Mona said. “Nothing.”

  I spent the rest of the day in my rooms, pacing out to the balcony and back.

  That night, like every night for the past several months, gunfire spat and pattered and the tires at the roadblocks burned. In the dark I saw muzzle flashes and ghostly shrouds of smoke. The men on the streets, including those outside our gate, clung to their barricades. Nothing seemed any different from before, except that I had lost Hector, and I could see no easy way to get him back.

  Did Dragon Guy’s appearance at Habitation Louvois mean he was in retreat? That seemed unlikely. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that he was here to regroup, to prepare for some even larger battle to come. In Cité Verd, no matter how many barricades he built, there was no way to keep
his enemies out. The place was too big, too exposed. Here he had walls and trees to give him cover and protection. President Duphay’s army had its barracks. Now Dragon Guy’s did too.

  And I feared I had every reason to believe they were here to stay.

  For several days, I remained in my rooms. Lethargy fell upon me like a fever, and I slept as I had not slept since I was a child. Some of those days I forgot to go to Mona, and since she would not come to me, on those days I ate almost nothing at all.

  Despite Dragon Guy’s proximity, I had no idea what was happening down below. The villas were invisible to me, hidden beneath the canopy of trees. Whatever they were doing was so well concealed that for short stretches I was able to forget they were even here. And that seemed to be the way they wanted it. It was as if we had come to a mutual understanding: west of the tree line behind the guesthouse was theirs; east was mine. I could see the preserve from my balcony, but I could no longer go there.

  Though they remained entirely out of sight, I did occasionally hear them. Voices sometimes, but mostly prosaic sounds: chopping, hammering. They were sounds of construction, sounds of people making themselves a permanent home.

  And as time passed, the noise grew louder. I could only assume that meant more of them kept arriving. But how many? One hundred? Two? It was impossible to know.

  There were days that passed without my ever leaving the balcony. I searched in desperation for any sign of Hector, still hoping I might be able to change his mind, if only I could talk to him again. Perhaps his brother feared just that, and that was why Hector was forced to stay away.

  For hours at a time I watched the shimmering waves in the bay or the tossing of treetops, and the whole world—everywhere but here—appeared to be at peace.

  I did not know what happened to the days and weeks other than that they slipped away and another took their place. Yet eventually even this new life grew routine. Gradually I began to leave my rooms, roaming about the manor house for signs of intruders.

  One morning I found myself in the library, leafing through books I had never thought to pick up before. I discovered a collection of travel volumes—stories of voyages to the Far East, expeditions to the frozen North. And there was more than one volume of journeys to the exotic tropics. In vain I turned every page, looking for mention of Habitation Louvois. After everything we had accomplished here, was it possible the only records were the ones I myself had kept? Was I the only hope of preserving its memory?

  That afternoon, with an urgency I had not felt since before Hector’s disappearance, I picked up pen and paper.

  “Do you remember,” I wrote to Madame,

  the visit from M. Gaetano, the cellist? He was a remarkable man, with hair like a flame tree. He was traveling with the smallest dog I had ever seen. I will never forget that day by the manor house pool when he gave an impromptu performance, and the guests came from across the estate, even the waiters and houseboys and maids. Everyone stopped to listen. It was the sort of magic we came to expect. Habitation Louvois was a place where things like that just happened, as if in a dream. We must never forget, so that when the time comes, we can create it again, even better than it was.

  When I finished I laid my head upon the desk, utterly drained. I still believed every word, but the belief was taking its toll.

  With no one attending to it, the manor house soon fell into neglect, accruing filth to such a degree that it could no longer be ignored. I did what work I could, sweeping, dusting, keeping things in order, all duties Mona had relinquished. I no longer saw her except at mealtimes. I took to brewing my own morning coffee in the restaurant kitchen, eliminating one tiresome daily round of having to prove to her that I was who I said I was. She had reluctantly given me a small sack of beans, warning me that I had better guard them, as I would get no more.

  After Hector’s first visit, he never returned. Of Raoul I saw not a sign. Still, a part of me would not accept that they had abandoned me. I knew how much the estate meant to Hector and how it must pain him to see his brother trample through it as if it were just another slum. And I knew how much Hector had come to depend on his lessons. I could not believe that he would give it all up, having come so far. But Hector was young, and the bonds of brotherhood were strong. My only hope was that he would come to his senses before his brother inflicted damage upon us that could not be undone.

  Then there was Raoul. Never had I known anyone more stubborn. According to Mona, Dragon Guy could convince the devil himself to do good. Given what his followers considered good, that was perhaps not such a stretch, but if there was any truth to Dragon Guy’s persuasive powers, Raoul was the proof.

  Despite our situation, the two market women continued showing up each morning with produce. Mona taught them a secret knock. It was the only way, she said, for her to know it was them and not one of the intruders. There was also a slight variation on the knock, which the market women were to use in case they were taken hostage. Mona was leaving nothing to chance.

  I was not given the option of a secret knock. Mona said she was afraid of her system becoming too complicated. I suggested a password, but she argued it would be too easy to overhear, given that Dragon Guy was likely to have spies watching and listening nearby. Instead, she tested me with trivia. If it was not the naming of the villas, it was something else having to do with the history of the estate. I decided not to point out to her that Raoul and Hector knew as much of the history as she did, and that they too could likely answer anything she might ask; I feared the security measures she would put in place if she knew.

  “Have Hector and Raoul come for food?” I asked her one afternoon as I sat at the kitchen table eating lunch.

  “Let them come,” she said. “I wouldn’t give them even a grain of rice.”

  And as she said it I felt a twinge of worry for the boy. Who was taking care of him? Who was seeing to it that he got what he needed? Who among them would understand how special he was?

  As for Dragon Guy and his men, they were getting food somehow, that much was clear. By now they had been here nearly three weeks.

  Sometimes I awoke suddenly in the night, thinking of something important I needed Hector and Raoul to attend to. Once I sprang up in a panic realizing I had neglected to ask Hector if his inspection of the wall had been a success. Another time it occurred to me that Raoul and I had never gotten a chance to finish installing the roofing tiles. It never took long for reality to set in, and when it did, I often sat up for hours, unable to fall back to sleep, imagining with dread Dragon Guy’s followers resting their dirty heads and dirty feet upon Madame’s clean beds.

  It was a peculiar feeling to be so surrounded and also so isolated. More than once I was embarrassed to find myself engaging in imaginary debates with Hector or his brother or Raoul or one of the other men whose names I did not know and had never met, haranguing them about the various outrages they were perpetrating against Madame’s estate.

  But the most disconcerting moment of all came one morning, perhaps a month after their arrival, when I arrived downstairs shortly after dawn to discover Dragon Guy sitting on a chaise longue in the foyer. Hearing my footsteps, he looked up and smiled. It had been so long since I had seen anyone that at first I was convinced I must be dreaming.

  But then to my consternation Dragon Guy came to life, stirring as I approached. It was as if he had been waiting there for me.

  “Good morning, monsieur,” he said in that incongruously soft voice of his. He pulled himself up into a sitting position. “This is quite a place you have here.”

  He leaned forward, and the flaps of his jacket opened. There again was his tattoo, an angry, skulking smear of color slathered across his chest. Whereas before I had caught just a glimpse, now I was granted a view of its full, terrible glory. It was green and red and blue and black, spiraling from his heart and sliding who-knew-how-far down past the waistline of his pants. A dragon, of course.

  Seeing me staring, he took hold of his lapels
and pulled the jacket all the way open, past his shoulders, and it slid down his back, leaving only his forearms covered. “You can come closer, if you want.”

  Even from where I stood the details were astonishing: individual scales that appeared to burst from his skin, and white, daggered teeth that were wet with saliva. The dragon’s head was turned toward the left, belching a torrent of flame down Dragon Guy’s arm.

  Only now, as I looked more closely, did I see a few imperfections, spots where the ink seemed displaced or discolored. Without meaning to, I did take another step toward him, and I realized the flaws were not in the tattoo, but in the skin underneath. There were scars everywhere. Not just beneath the dragon, but on Dragon Guy’s unpainted right side as well, from his collarbone to his belly and all up and down his arms. I could not conceive of where he had gotten them all. A man could not survive so many wounds. And he was in only his early twenties.

  “When I was younger,” he said, pressing gingerly on one of the jagged tracks, “I was reckless.”

  Younger? I thought. Starting when he was still on his mother’s breast? “And now?”

  “I’m grateful every day to be alive. Aren’t you?”

  Despite my failure to supply an answer, he nodded somberly, as if we were the sort of men who could agree on a great many things.

  “When I was young I wasted a lot of time.” He wrinkled his nose in my direction, giving his nostrils a flare. “What do you think when you look back on how you’ve spent your life?”

  “Are you a therapist, too?”

  Dragon Guy folded his arms across his chest and held himself for a moment in an awkward embrace. From where I stood, it looked as if he were strangling the dragon.

  I realized I should stick with simpler words if I wished for him to follow. “What do you want?”