Between most of the men there was room enough for a single person to stand. But there were also seven or eight men side by side on the dining room table, separated by only a few inches of bare mahogany. Nowhere on any of the beds was there a single sheet. Those had been turned into wrappings, which I saw now encircling arms and legs and feet and hands—or whatever it was that remained of them.
There must have been sixty or seventy beds, but that seemed too few. I had never seen so much blood, staining not just the men themselves but the beds and the floor and even the walls. A few heads turning to look at me led to a few more, until half the room was gazing at me with both curiosity and indifference, as if eager for distraction but sorry it came in no other form than me.
The last to notice me were the two women in dirty dresses and head scarves at the far end of the room, facing the windows as they examined one of their patients.
“What do you want?” one of them asked, glancing distractedly at me over her shoulder as she ground something in a mortar.
“Nothing.”
She had already turned back around, as if I had not spoken.
Throughout the rest of the guesthouse I found more of the same. Every room on the first floor was filled with beds and sick, wounded bodies: more men in the dining room and a ward of women in the library. In the kitchen several women with blackened fingers were grinding herbs and making poultices while a pot boiled over on the stove.
“Are you lost?” one of them asked.
“I’m looking for Hector.”
She dropped a rag in the boiling pot. “Haven’t seen him.”
“Try out back,” said another.
The corridor off the kitchen led to the back patio, an otherwise short route made treacherous by the trash spilling underfoot. I had not been in the yard behind the guesthouse in some time—since long before Dragon Guy’s arrival. Yet despite everything I had seen of late, I was still surprised to stand beside the empty pool and find not a single flower. The grass was mostly gone as well. Alone, barefoot in the dirt with a shovel at his side, an old man with a raw pink patch of skin covering the right side of his face peered down into the hole he was digging, as if trying to measure its depth. All around him, rectangular patches of dark soil showed where many more such holes had recently been filled. At the edge of the patio, a six-foot bundle lay wrapped in yet another stained sheet.
“The service is over.”
“I see.”
The old man stabbed his shovel into the earth. “There’s still time to pay your respects.”
Seeing me standing there uncertainly, he came forward and took me by the arm. When we were just a few inches from the body, he lowered his head and closed his eyes.
I tried to tell myself that people did it all the time, praying for strangers. In a place like this, one did not always have the luxury of a face to identify the dead. And what did it matter, really? The dead all wanted the same thing.
I, too, closed my eyes and lowered my head. The smell made it impossible to forget what was at my feet.
In the self-imposed darkness an image began to draw itself in my mind. I did not want it there, and I fought it back, but it would not go away. So I opened my eyes, and for a moment everything was better. But when I closed my eyes again, the image returned. I could see nothing but Senator Marcus. His fine features, his carefully clipped mustache. But he was not dead. He was asleep in his bed, utterly at peace.
Very well, I said to myself, holding my breath, and I prayed. I prayed for the Senator’s soul, and for the soul in the bag, and for Hector and Mlle Trouvé and Mona and Madame, and even for Dragon Guy and all the doomed souls he had brought here with him, and I hoped—despite the abundant signs to the contrary—that it might do someone some good.
Sitting on the balcony that evening, I was relieved to find the image of Senator Marcus gone. But I was left now with all those men wrapped in rags soaked in their own blood. I tried to put them out of my head, too. But I had nothing to replace them with. When I tried to think about how things had once been, I could see them only as they were now. There were no more gardens. After three months of their presence, there was not a single thing on the estate anymore that shone. Not even the lifetime supply of floor polish Paul had sold me could erase the traces of what had happened here. That blood would always remain.
And as dusk came on and—like every night—I watched Dragon Guy’s men march up the drive to resume their endless battle, I felt a numbness come over me. How many would return in tatters and how many not at all? So futile did the entire exercise seem that I failed to see the point. I doubted if they knew themselves what awaited them outside the gate, no matter how many times they had gone out there. One could see the same blankness on a goat tethered to a stake, oblivious that the knife ground against the whetstone was intended for him. Nor was I sure anything would have changed if the men had known. It was a brutal fate, and this was a brutal place, but they were brutal themselves. Even the sad little men I had come to know at supper were brutal in their own sad little ways. Their lives were no more than this. What was the point in mourning them? Why bother trying to save them when they were too stupid to save themselves? These were the same people who had plagued me all my life. I had thought I had escaped them; maybe I had been a fool even to try.
If the fighting was more vicious that night than usual, I barely noticed. It was all the same to me whether there were ten guns firing or ten thousand. I laid my head down on my feather pillow, and I went to sleep. And I slept as I had not slept in years. Nothing—not a single sound—penetrated, and even my dreams left no impression.
And when I awoke in the morning, just as the sun was rising, I felt oddly refreshed. The blood had been washed away after all. Standing out on the balcony, I looked down upon the canopy of trees below, blotting out the villas and their inhabitants. For once there was no smoke, and it occurred to me that from my old window in Senator Marcus’s attic the distant green oasis on the mountainside would appear no different today than it had then, no less inviting.
I had been out on the balcony only a few minutes when I heard the commotion at the gate. The goats were coming back from the slaughter. And as I turned to watch them bump and bleat back down the drive to their beds—much more slowly than they had gone out—I thought to myself, Let them do what they will. Let them kill themselves, if that is what they want. But may they do it quickly.
That morning, an unmistakable pall clung to Dragon Guy’s men, apparent even from so great a distance. Not until they were almost below me did I see why. At the lead, where I had never seen her before, strode René-Thérèse. The woman who ordinarily carried herself like a queen shuffled now like a penitent. Beside her walked two men I did not recognize, struggling to bear a stretcher between them, upon which lay the still form of a man dressed in a white linen suit. How strange, I thought, that nowhere did I see a single spot of blood. One panel of the jacket had fallen away from Dragon Guy’s chest, revealing the intense green dragon. René-Thérèse gripped the fabric in her fingers, as if trying to keep the creature from flying away.
Instead of dispersing as they usually did upon reaching the end of the drive, the men clung limply together, watching the stretcher bearers stumble up the steps to the guesthouse with Dragon Guy. Two of the nurses stood waiting in the doorway. The grim looks with which they beheld their coming charge told everyone watching everything they needed to know about their leader’s fate.
Soon there was shouting in the lobby, and the noise grew steadily louder as the men stomped upstairs. There were voices everywhere, and I found myself clinging to the arms of my chair until they passed, slamming seemingly every door on the second floor, except for the one belonging to the colonel. The manor house trembled and I did too, before allowing myself one deep, hopeful breath.
Perhaps the dragon was not invincible after all.
Almost no one showed up for breakfast. Among those who did, there seemed to be a sense that only silence would be pe
rmitted. In no case would I have dared to speak. Now more than ever I knew I must hold my tongue and wait.
For the rest of the day, everyone hung about in a suspended state, waiting for the dreaded news they thought might come at any moment. Me as much as anyone else. But I did not take part in the endless speculation.
Black Max had been shot alongside his friend, and he was already dead. No one saw it happen. There were some who insisted it must have been one of Dragon Guy’s own men who did it, someone trusted, someone close. If that was true, was the traitor still among us? For the first time since they arrived here, I saw them eyeing each other with a suspicion they normally reserved for me. I could not have been more happy to share.
Never could I have imagined their idyll could crumble so quickly.
For once, I was glad when the evening darkness began its lazy creep over the mountains and the nightly assembling of arms commenced upon the lawn. They would not take the night off to sit at the side of their leader, waiting for him to die. Indeed, they seemed more eager than ever to fight. I could not wait until they were gone, taking their fury with them. From within my office—even with the shutters closed—I heard snatches of speeches trying to inflame them further.
“Dragon Guy is worth a hundred men,” one of them boomed, as if he were shouting through a horn. “Tonight we will kill a thousand.”
“Destroy them all,” screamed someone else, sounding as if blood were already running from his lips.
And then came the chant, bursting from every hysterical throat: “Duphay shall pay.”
Before they began their frantic march up the drive, I peeked out just once, and what I saw was more than two hundred men raising their weapons to the heavens, and their cry for revenge was like a cannon. In the center of it all, Hector stood, silent and still, like a boy lost in a crowd.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The news that Dragon Guy was dead reached me in my sleep. It was not yet dawn when I heard the sobs and sprang up out of bed, hurrying to the balcony. There were two women clinging to one another on the lawn below, their necks entwined like birds. Each was the only thing keeping the other erect. Their cries were loud enough to wake the entire estate.
The mood around the manor house was grim, even worse than the day before. In seemingly every corner, small groups of men and women huddled, talking in low voices. No one seemed to have any idea what to do, and so they did nothing. Here and there men paced in silence, staring absently at the walls. They collected under every shady tree, like fallen fruit.
As word spread, so too did the rumor that perhaps Dragon Guy had been dead all along, and that only now were they telling us. That the men suspected such a thing gave me hope I had until now not dared to dream.
The blood pounded in my ears. Without Dragon Guy, would there be nothing to keep all of this from unraveling and his army from fleeing?
Throughout the day, the words “What now?” were on nearly everyone’s lips, but it was their eyes—both heavy and quick—that gave away their fear. And then there was me, doing everything I could to keep my rising hope to myself. I struggled to remain still, abandoning a letter to Madame after getting no further than the salutation. When at last my rooms grew too constrictive, I went outside, making certain to keep my eyes low to the ground.
At the door to Mona’s kitchen I knocked quietly.
“Mona,” I whispered, but she would not answer.
It was difficult to keep from yelling the news to her, loudly enough that everyone would hear.
School had been canceled at the casino. The restaurant was empty; even Claire was gone.
The one familiar face I finally came across as I was walking along the paths was Marc’s. I was unaccustomed to seeing him without his skinny friend, and I wondered if Louis was off somewhere seeking comfort in the arms of Lulu.
It was clear that Marc, too, was in distress. “What will happen?” he said. “What will we do?”
“I wish I knew,” I said. But he continued to look at me expectantly, as if certain I possessed the information he so desperately needed. I added, “All I know are the rumors.”
His eyes opened wide in anticipation.
“I’ve heard this will probably be the end.” I did not wish to lie to Marc. I liked him too much for that. But in fact this had already begun to feel like the truth. As I said it, I felt my mind spinning on, putting together the pieces to come, assembling a list of what needed to be done. The repairs, the planting, the painting, the cleaning. It was not too late. Hector would come back, and together we could fix the estate so that Madame would never have to know what had happened. By the time she returned, it would be just as it was. Perhaps not just, but close enough that she might once again feel she was home.
“Is it true?”
“It is,” I said, and I meant it. “I’m sure of it. And do you know what that means?”
He did not try to disguise that he did not.
“It’s time for you to go find your wife and daughter.”
Something changed in his face. A brightening. An opening. I could see the idea did not displease him, and I was relieved. First Marc, and then the others would follow.
“What if I can’t find them?”
“You will.”
He thought about that for a moment. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Your wife,” he said. “There’s no more point in waiting. She’ll never come back now.”
Having created this deceit, I had no choice but to agree. Inside, though, I was beaming; with Dragon Guy gone, there would be nothing to keep Mme Freeman from coming back.
Just then, over Marc’s shoulder, I spotted a boy running toward us up the path. He could have been one of Mlle Trouvé’s students, but not one I recognized. As he drew closer, Marc heard his footsteps and turned, and I saw that the boy was waiting to say something.
“What do you want?” Marc said with uncharacteristic irritation.
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Coming where?”
“There’s going to be an announcement.”
“Wait,” I said, reaching out for Marc as he started off after the boy.
“Later.”
“Promise me,” I said.
He brushed me off, waving for me to come along. “We’ll talk about it later.”
By the time we arrived at Dragon Guy’s villa, the boy had long since disappeared into the crowd. Everyone was there: half-dressed men who appeared to have come straight from bed; women holding paring knives and laundry baskets. Even the children had come, drawn in by the promise of some rare kind of excitement. They were packed in around the pool, filling every last space. In front of me I could see almost nothing but heads. Perhaps three to four hundred. I saw them, and my head fell into my hands. Dear God, I thought, How could I possibly get rid of so many?
“What do you think is happening up there?” Marc asked.
Every once in a while there was the briefest of openings, and I thought I could see the edge of some kind of structure. I could not tell what.
I gestured to Marc to stay where he was. “I’ll go and see if I can get a better look.”
Squeezing through a gap, I made my way toward the edge of the courtyard. There, beneath the sunlit canopy of a mombin tree, was a low stone bench. That little bit of height made all the difference. Beyond the heads, beyond the pool, directly in front of Dragon Guy’s villa, a small wooden platform rose above the patio. It was impossible to hear over the crowd, but on one corner of the platform an old man was kneeling, weakly tapping nails into the boards below him. He was all there was to see.
For several minutes the old man continued to hammer. Several times he dropped a nail, and it was painful to watch him searching, his failing eyes of little use. When at last he was finally done, he wobbled to one knee. Using the hammer as a cane, he pushed himself unsteadily up the rest of the way. He had aged so much so quickly that at first I did not recognize him. It was as if the la
st three months had for him stretched into years. Even now, as he turned around and faced the crowd, only his blue plaid shirt gave him away.
“Raoul,” I yelled. “Raoul.” But with all the noise there was no way to get his attention.
At the back of the platform he was met by one of Dragon Guy’s guards, who lifted him up by his armpits and then lowered him to the ground, as if he were a child. In an instant, he was gone from sight, and there was no way for me to go after him.
Just as quickly, the noise evaporated too. It was eerie how suddenly it happened—as if someone had flipped a switch.
Hector ascended the stairs to the stage slowly, like an old man himself, unsure of his footing. As he made his way to the center, he looked at us with a strange uncertainty, as if he did not know how he came to find himself there. One might have mistaken him for someone strolling unawares into a surprise party. Seeing him here now, I realized how much he had grown in recent months. At sixteen, Hector had nearly reached the height of his brother, and he was almost equally broad and strong. But he was still a boy, and no matter how big he had grown, he could not help looking small up there all alone.
No one in the crowd dared to speak. What did they make of him? I wondered. Was he anything to them other than Dragon Guy’s little brother? Would they try to resist when he told them it was time to leave, to go back to Cité Verd?
Hector lifted his arms awkwardly, stiffly from his sides, forcing them to fold across his chest. He was trying to look like a defiant warrior. Where had he learned such a pose? It was nothing I had ever seen on his brother. Where did a boy who had grown up in a place like Cité Verd, utterly cut off from history and the rest of the world, find a model upon which to build such an image?
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