The others arrived from every direction, already dancing when they entered my view. How was it that they seemed to know just what to do? There was no hesitation, no discussion. Within just a few minutes, the patio around the pool, which had been almost entirely empty, was suddenly trampled in bodies. Never had I seen so many of them in one place. There must have been at least a hundred.
I marveled at how carefree they seemed, as if this were the most natural place in the world for them to be throwing a party. Their feet moved instinctively. They tossed their heads and bodies, swaying to the music. The ground shuddered beneath me. Soon they ran out of space on the patio and the dancing spread toward the trees, coming closer and closer. I waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hector, but he was not there.
Rising to my hands and knees, I inched backward out of the cavity. Not until I was sure no one could see me did I get to my feet.
The drumming and shouting chased me back to Villa Moreau, pushing me from behind. No doubt it would have followed me all the way up to the manor house. But just then a breeze blew through, carrying with it the smoke I had been inhaling for weeks—but stronger now than it had ever been before. It was earthy and heavy, and soon it filled the air.
With my head still swollen with the thumps of the drums, I turned around and headed back down the path I had cut to the forest preserve, following the corrosive smoke. It grew thicker and thicker, until I had to cover my mouth with my sleeve. I did not have to worry about anyone seeing me now.
As it turned out, I did not have far to go.
Just beyond the fork, in a clearing along the north trail, ran an enormous mound of earth perhaps ten meters long. And there was the smoke, escaping like steam from a poorly covered pot. As I drew closer, I felt the heat pressing against me like an outstretched hand, urging me to stop. After several more steps I could bear to go no farther.
Hell after all.
* * *
The next morning over breakfast I told Mona what I had seen.
“They’re burning the trees,” I said. “They’re turning the preserve into charcoal.”
“You’re a fool,” she said. They were words that even a month before she would never have spoken to me. But it was undeniable that our circumstances had changed.
“If we knew what they were planning,” I said, “there might be something we could do.”
“If we knew,” Mona said, “we would be no better off than them.”
“I thought you wanted me to get rid of them?”
Mona shook her head. “It’s too late for that now.”
“There has to be a way,” I said.
Mona pushed a forkful of rice through the last clumps of yolk on her plate. “Mark my words, the army will come. And when they do, I intend to say that I have been in my kitchen. I know nothing,” she said, “and that will be what saves me.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Each night, as darkness fell, Dragon Guy and his men continued slipping back out of the estate to resume their clashes in the streets with President Duphay’s troops. Each night, from my balcony, I could hear them at the roadblock outside the gate, telling each other jokes and singing obscene songs while they waited to be attacked. My daily schedule began to mirror theirs: up all night and then asleep at dawn.
What did I do during those hours? I had grown adept at following the muddled movements of men and guns. Most of all, I listened for signs that Dragon Guy was finally weakening. It had to be only a matter of time before he ran out of men. If not men, certainly bullets.
I ate little, sometimes waking and going straight to the blind behind Villa Bisset without stopping first at the kitchen. I sat for hours, observing the activity in the courtyard, occasionally moving to a different blind for a view of different villas. It grew so routine that I seldom paused to consider my purpose. What was the point of the notes I was taking? Only, it seemed, that information gave me comfort; it fed the illusion that if I knew enough, I would somehow be able to get them to leave.
One night, while Dragon Guy and his men were out fighting, I decided to leave the safety of my rooms. By the light of the moon I got dressed and made my way out of the manor house. This time I did not use the path I had cut behind Villa Moreau. Tonight, for the first time since Dragon Guy had come to stay, I followed the cobblestones to Madame’s private villa.
Unlike all the rest, the courtyard outside Madame’s villa betrayed none of the usual signs of habitation. There was no fire ring and no pots and pans. The trees had been spared and there were no vegetable patches. In fact, the trees here had been recently trimmed and someone had thinned out the undergrowth. The stones appeared recently swept. Somehow they had even managed to fill the pool. It was as if the place were being preserved for some special purpose.
Nevertheless, I entered Madame’s villa feeling a sense of dread. Yet, from the moment I stepped inside, it was as though Madame had never left. Her perfume bottles stood at attention on her dressing table, along with her old mother-of-pearl brush. Her display of photos in gold and silver frames remained arrayed in a perfect fan on the credenza, as though no one had thought to look at them, lacking even the mildest curiosity about whose home this was. The bed was made. Who among them would know how? I was sure Dragon Guy, until the day he arrived here, had never in his life slept on anything other than a pallet.
Hector. Who else could have taken such good care of things?
In the wardrobe I at last found traces of Dragon Guy—a soiled shirt hanging as though it were a handmade suit. At least he owned a shirt. Beside it dangled an orange dress. There were two pillows on the bed, and each one smelled of someone different. But neither belonged to Hector. It was not here that he slept.
Looking around, I found it inconceivable that a man such as Dragon Guy could so easily take Mme Freeman’s place, that such a change could amount to so little. A different wardrobe, a different scent. Everything else the same.
And where, right now, was Mme Freeman? Did she have any idea of what was happening here? No doubt she had been reading about us in her papers; she knew the general outline. Perhaps she was even hoping Dragon Guy would prevail. After everything President Duphay had done to destroy her hotel, she could not be blamed for wanting to see him flee in disgrace. But she could not understand the cost at which that would come. Dragon Guy was anything but a savior, especially for Habitation Louvois.
Even if Madame did not know all of the details, she at least knew the estate and the capital, the terrain upon which the battles were being fought. That was more than I knew of her world. Among the magazines left behind over the years by our guests were one or two dedicated to homes and gardens around the States. Inside were pictures of houses that looked nothing like the Marcuses’, nor any other home I had ever seen. What surprised me the most was how bland the majority of them were, white the most common color. Occasionally brick. Somehow, despite all the flowers in neat, vibrant beds, the places seemed lifeless, as if no one actually lived there. And yet I could not help noticing that none of them were ever surrounded with walls.
I found it impossible to imagine Madame strolling such flat, treeless expanses of grass. And what did the stores she shopped in look like? The streets she drove down? Was her company in one of those featureless glass towers? The photos on the credenza showed faces against backdrops of mountains and oceans and beaches, views of Madame and her friends and family on vacation. But on vacation from what?
I closed the wardrobe and returned everything to where I had found it. One thing was certain: she could never know what was happening here. I would have to live with my failings, but I could not live with her discovering that I had allowed a man such as Dragon Guy to poison her most private sanctuary.
On my way back to the manor house I struggled in the dark to avoid tripping on the overgrown underbrush along the paths. I was nearly at Villa Bardot and the last set of steps before the drive when I noticed someone coming toward me. Whoever it was had not yet noticed me, for I had only j
ust turned the bend—but there was nowhere to hide. And then it was too late.
“Is that you, François?” she said as she reached the bottom step.
“Yes,” I said.
She came toward me swiftly, tall and lean. “How do you expect to heal when you’re out here limping around?” she said with gentle reproach. “You should be in bed.”
And then she stood directly before me, a young woman with a red kerchief wrapped around her head. I realized she was the one I had seen with Dragon Guy that first day he had arrived. And I knew in an instant the orange dress in Madame’s wardrobe belonged to her.
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
She folded her arms across her chest. She was a head and a half above me, and I could make out her face no better than she could mine.
“Your leg will never heal if you don’t rest.”
“Of course,” I said.
She reached out and took my arm, and I assumed a limp as she eased me down the path. I let her lead, and she directed me to Villa Garbo, bringing me right to the door.
“I’ll help you into bed,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I can manage from here.”
“Very well.” She took my hand in hers, and I was surprised by the roughness of her skin. “Get some sleep,” she said, “and if I hear you’ve been out wandering around again, you’re going to have to answer to me.” And then she bent down and kissed me on the forehead. I recognized her wild scent.
* * *
I drew a map of the estate, a crude rendering—rectangles and squares to represent the manor and guesthouse, the villas and outbuildings and various other structures. I was reminded of the hotel blueprints from all those years ago, and I was surprised how much I had retained from them. Lines of varying thickness marked the drive and the paths. I made note of the villas Dragon Guy had occupied.
What I realized was that the estate was made up of three parallel sections, all virtually identical in size. The boundary of the first was formed by the drive, and within it was the manor house and the pavilion, the discotheque and casino, the outbuildings and the easternmost villas, those Dragon Guy had left unoccupied. The next section, to the west of the drive, contained the guesthouse and the rest of the villas, and it extended down to the path leading to the preserve, which itself formed the last of the sections.
I knew the hole in the wall was not in the first section. Had it been, at one time or another I would have seen Dragon Guy coming and going. I also knew the hole was not along the south wall of the second section, because it was there that I had cut my path. I knew, in fact, that the hole was not anywhere along the southern wall, because if it had been, Dragon Guy would have used the path leading to the preserve to get to it, and I would have seen him from my blind behind Villa Bacall.
That left only the northern wall, which meant the hole must be deep in the preserve, where the wall butted up against Cité Verd.
The slums gave Dragon Guy the cover he needed.
The next morning, while Dragon Guy and his soldiers slept, I snuck into the preserve. It took me only an hour to find the spot where feet had beaten down a trail off the main path.
The hole was just where I expected it to be. Yet how quickly my satisfaction turned to disappointment. What had I expected? Something dramatic, I suppose. Looking at it now, I could not help but laugh at how insignificant a thing it was. Nothing more than a gap where the wall had crumbled, the stones falling inward, scattered by the back and forth of Dragon Guy’s men. Two meters wide, no more. That was all it took to transform an impregnable wall into a turnstile.
But it was all there, all the pieces I would need to put it back together again.
That night, after Dragon Guy and his followers had left to continue their fight, I returned to the wall. Down the rugged paths I struggled to navigate an old wheelbarrow in which I had collected a trowel, a bucket filled with glass bottles, and a half-full sack of cement I had found in the shed. With water from the spring I quickly mixed the cement, and then I set to work fitting the stones back into place. The bottles I broke, planting the shards along the top of the reconstructed wall.
Then came the fire. If anyone on the other side saw the flames, they did not come to investigate. The wall baked until dawn, and then, just before I knew Dragon Guy would return—or rather, try to return—I tamped down the embers and I went home to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Watching from the balcony as they made their way down the drive, it struck me how well each man’s weapon seemed to fit his bearing. The strongest—or those who otherwise managed to hold themselves the most erect—possessed an assortment of assault rifles and machine guns, some with pistols in reserve, tucked into their waistbands. Most of the others, thin and ragged, carried whatever they had been able to obtain: shotguns, revolvers, rifles.
But then there were the stragglers, dragging their feet as if they were something old and useless, carrying nothing but machetes.
It was a subdued procession, not at all the triumphant return of conquering warriors. In all there must have been close to two hundred of them. And that did not appear to include any women.
At the lead marched Dragon Guy in his white linen suit, Hector at his side. I knew Raoul was somewhere among them. Who else could have unlocked the gate to let them in? And why had I not thought of that? Had I learned nothing from everything that came before?
Now that I had taken away their hole in the wall, they would come in through the front gate, like welcome guests.
In the coming days it became clear how much else would change as well. And how quickly. It was as if they had been waiting for such an invitation all along.
The next afternoon, just about two months after they first arrived here, several of Dragon Guy’s men appeared at the manor house, entering the library as I was sitting there reading.
“We can fit two dozen or so here,” one of them said, surveying the room. I had never seen the man before: short, with a long continuous brow shadowing his eyes like a promontory.
I rose from my chair, and the short man’s brow rippled toward me.
“Did Dragon Guy send you to talk to me?” I asked.
“Who are you?”
“I’m the manager.”
The man’s brow folded in on itself. “The manager of what?”
“The estate.”
He looked at me uncertainly. “I could use a cup of water,” he said.
“That’s not what I do.”
“Never mind.” Turning around, he led the others back out to the corridor and on to the ballroom.
Their move-in was fast but orderly. They had prepared in advance who would go where, and the men transported their few belongings without difficulty. They passed me in the halls with their small bundles, most of them failing even to notice me.
In the club room and the library and the ballroom and in the rest of the other rooms on the first floor they laid out their bedrolls. The outbuildings became dormitories once again. Others settled into the suites upstairs, Madame and M. Gadds’s old offices. Mine they left alone. But on the second floor their numbers were smaller, only one or two men to each room. Through the walls I heard the shifting of furniture and footsteps coming and going in the hall.
That first night, at odd hours, I awoke to officious knocking on my neighbors’ doors and obsequious voices addressing “colonels” and “majors” and “captains.”
A mad scrambling up the stairs in the dark of the morning carried a “message from the general.” The message itself was muffled with the closing of a door.
Apparently, my neighbors were men of rank, Dragon Guy’s lieutenants. In addition to the private rooms, they were apparently privileged with staying behind when the fighting commenced.
As had become my habit, I too spent that first night awake, listening to the sounds of the battle beyond the gate. But while my neighbors were preoccupied with whether or not they were winning, I spent the night trying to find ways to ensure
they would lose. Even now, with the manor house fully invaded, my goal struck me as no less improbable than theirs.
But what, in fact, was I to do, one man against hundreds? There was no force I could bring to bear, no sort of coercion of which I could conceive. So I asked myself, what would Senator Marcus do? Or Mme Freeman, if she were here? I knew already what my father would say, that Dragon Guy and his followers had just as much right to be here as I did. But I had sworn to serve the estate, not to provide shelter and haven for anyone who might seek it. And in any case, I disagreed. They had no more right to invade my home than I did theirs, and I would not sit idly by and let it happen.
In the dawn, heavy with exhaustion but no closer to a solution, I shuffled out to the balcony to watch Dragon Guy’s soldiers return, as limp and hushed as the morning before. They drifted together in small clusters, speaking quietly of—I could not guess what it was they spoke of. Judging by their mild expressions, it could have been something as banal as the weather. It occurred to me how much they resembled common laborers coming back from the field. They could have been carrying picks and hoes instead of arms, and nothing else would have been any different.
Within a couple of minutes, the soldiers had passed, their day finally over. And I was left alone with mine. At this dark stage my day seemed to offer neither beginning nor end.
I was about to go back inside—perhaps to sleep, perhaps to piece together some sort of plan—when suddenly I heard a cry. I looked up again to find more movement at the top of the drive.
The second wave of men progressed so slowly it was possible to study every bloody shirt, every bandaged head. That first morning I counted eight men, some limping, some dragged or carried. I wondered how many more had been left behind, their bodies without hope of recovery.
By the time the wounded reached the end of the drive, the others before them had disappeared, as if—in order to be able to continue—the living had to forget the dying and the dead.
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