A flare blazed silently over no-man’s-land, magnesium blue, a fizzing vertical scar in the murk. “Look at that, Grace. It’s beautiful, in an awful kind of way.”
“When my daddy was drinking and wanted to hunt something at night for the hell of it, he’d set a torch in the fork of a tree and shoot the deer when they came to see the light. Same thinking, darling,” Grace said quietly.
A truck banged out of the darkness. Grace saw him first, hanging off the passenger running board, a silly grin on his face. “I declare, Ellie, a ship in the night,” Grace said, drawing on the Gitane. She gave Eleanor a wink that cut through her heart. Eleanor took an extra pull at the brandy as Jacob Roth strode into the pool of light.
“Good evening, ladies,” he announced. “We have finished our bridge. Tomorrow we start the schoolhouse. We brought a kettle of potato soup from the sappers as a reward. I invite you to dinner.” He pulled a bundle of newspapers from inside his oilskin jacket. “I have the newspapers, yesterday’s, straight from Paris. Here, you may read.”
“Now there’s a real Pennsylvania gentleman, Ellie,” Grace said. She linked her arm in the big carpenter’s. “We have a few more bales, Jacob. Why don’t you and those Mennonites boys get that kettle on the woodstove. We’ll be over presently.” Grace gave him a light peck on the cheek, and even in the gaslight Eleanor could see the big Amish fellow blush.
The night sky suddenly glowed bright as day. The duty officer from the medical corps down the road was shouting at them to douse the truck’s gaslights. Somewhere above, a German aircraft circled; the French searchlights and anti-aircraft fire meant a blackout.
They ate the rich potato soup around the stove in the dark while the guns pounded away in the next field. When the soup kettle was empty, the Mennonites began to sing in old Dutch, a slow song of thanksgiving into the Marne night.
Cannon fire woke Eleanor from a sleep so deep that for one long moment she forgot where she was. Onethousandoneonethousandtwo: she listened as a family of mice scrabbled over the tin roof. Someone had told her how to count off the seconds to tell where the shells would fall—somewhere well to the south. She fitted her spectacles and peered between the barn boards: the explosions lit the clouds like sky-lightning. Eleanor held her wristwatch up. The flash of the explosions illuminated her watch face: 4.15 a.m. The shells awoke the big ravens in their lair beneath the metal roof of the toolshed next to the barn, their fluttering wings battered the tin roof.
She had read one of Jacob’s American newspapers in her cot the night before, by the light of a margarine candle. The headlines spoke of Russia’s drift into anarchy and a separate peace with Germany. Eleanor thought of Allen and his machinations. Whose was the important war? Foster’s, closeted in a military intelligence office in Washington with his legal papers and telegrams, or Allen’s, running like a foxhound among his spies, or hers, in the stench of it, within range of the guns?
Grace’s hammock, tied between the big loft beams, curled empty, her blankets gone. Eleanor pulled on her socks and boots and climbed down the loft ladder. Below, the rows of cots were empty for once. The French medical corpsmen had been reassigned. They left so little behind, she marveled, the scrupulous way of men under discipline.
The barn door hung open.
The shelling stopped; nothing broke the silence of the yard. A lantern glowed in the kitchen of the battered farmhouse, but that always burnt overnight, for the medical quartermaster’s work was never done. A hatless uniformed man, he remained bent over his papers, toiling amidst a faint scent of burnt coffee.
A flare from the German artillery spotters lit the barnyard for a long moment and Eleanor recognized Grace’s silhouette. Jacob towered over her, his head bent over hers. Grace leant on Jacob, blankets wrapped around them both. They danced, so slowly Eleanor at first thought they’d frozen on the spot. Grace hummed that same parlor song they’d once sung together at Bryn Mawr.
Eleanor watched. Crosscurrents of shame and jealousy and betrayal ebbed through her. Another shell flash lit the yard; she could feel the artillery’s distant impact through the soles of her feet. In the dying light her eyes locked with Grace’s. Grace gently shook her head and let Jacob lead her toward the shadows, her eyes closing.
Eleanor reached for the barn door to steady herself. Then her eyes blurred and a trickle of salt crept into the corner of her lips, stinging. I must move. Eleanor turned back into the barn; she didn’t draw a deep breath until she found her cot and stumbled under the cold blankets. She drew herself tight as she could, knees to her chest, willing herself to breathe, to be warm, safe. Her pillow crackled, the broken feathers rustling as she pressed her head deep into their warmth.
The departing truck woke her. The Mennonites sang a plainchant hymn as they rode the clattering Renault out of the yard. Eleanor opened her eyes and then the memory of Grace and her carpenter struck home. I’m not getting up. She would feign sickness. I refuse to get up. She found her spectacles, looked at her watch: it was past eight. A patter of morning rain had replaced the overnight stillness and the fog had returned, smelling oddly like damp laundry. Grace’s circular mirror was on the loft floorboards, within reach.
Eleanor picked it up and examined herself. Her face was a puzzle to her. It seemed to rearrange itself at will, from the unattractive to the radiant. Over homework one evening Allen had told her once she’d a face like a pachyderm’s behind and she’d hit him with the book she’d been reading—Kipling, she remembered, probably what gave Allen the idea. Her wiry hair was a lifelong embarrassment, her eyes dim and too small behind the thick spectacles, her lips thin and unsensual. What in high heaven had Grace ever seen in her? She swept her hair back. Only her smooth forehead and the set of her nose, she thought, had any breeding and saved her from a supremely forgettable face. It’s hopeless, she thought, I’m hopeless.
“Well, lazybones,” Grace called up from below. “You planning to sleep through the rest of the war?”
Eleanor snuggled into the warmth. “It’s raining. I’m sick.”
“Which is it?” Grace climbed the ladder, humming. “If you’re sick, Ellie, get to the infirmary,” Grace said as she gained the loft. “It could be that influenza.”
She coiled herself next to Eleanor’s cot and even in the thin light Eleanor could see she was aglow beneath the halo of red hair.
“We need a cat about the place,” Grace observed. “There’s a nest of mice in the roof. Listen.” A scrabble of clawed feet headed for the far end of the loft. “A big black and white tom. That’s what we need. It’s clearing toward the west, but there’s heavy fog just now. Darling, you look all in, now that I get a good look at you.”
Eleanor wrapped the hospital blankets around herself and sat up. “I saw you two last night.”
Grace scraped a match and lit a pair of Gitanes, passed one to Eleanor. “We’ve grown up since freshman year, Ellie. I want a man around, darling. No offense.” She bent over and kissed Eleanor softly on the forehead.
Eleanor looked away, then back at Grace.
“I’ve never lived life by halves,” Grace said. “Neither should you.” She blew a column of blue smoke among the roof beams. “I’m sorry you’re hurt, honey.” She plucked a shred of tobacco from her lip. “I’ve never done a thing I haven’t wanted to, Ellie.” Grace inhaled again, then carefully butted her half-finished cigarette. “Save yours, there’s no more until Friday.” She stood, staring down at Eleanor, then extracted the mirror from among the covers. “Eleanor, a word of advice: when the day starts badly, don’t go anywhere near a mirror. Bad for the soul. Come, darling, let’s see about that cat.”
Grace led her by the hand across the barnyard, looking for the quartermaster. “The French will have a rational way of obtaining a cat in a military zone,” Grace said over her shoulder, just as the thunder rolled out of the fog. A smear of orange Eleanor would never forget, like those flecks of sunlight in that Frenchman’s paintings of the Rouen cathedral. Then nothing, only mi
st, a damp itch like a spiderweb on her face as the orange disappeared into the white wool of the fog. Then the shouting started, mingled with the sound of boots sprinting through the mud. From not far off, toward the minefield boundary, Eleanor heard a terrible keening cry, and that must have been Grace disappearing at a run into the gray.
Outside it was raining again.
“They departed the road in the fog,” the one-armed doctor was saying, looking up from the forms accounting for the lost truck. “The brakes were locked, but they couldn’t stop with the weight of the wood. And now …” He passed his hand over the papers. “A quick death. One can find comfort in that. They were good men, men of conscience.” He shook his head. After three years of war the doctor had little sympathy left in him, but he spared what he could for the strangers who had come from half a world away to die trying to build this village a schoolhouse. He began to write again, backhanded, Eleanor could see.
“Perhaps if you dictate to me,” she offered.
“No, it is my duty. I will write it myself. You should really see to your friend.” He nodded and bent to his paperwork again.
Eleanor left the tiny office and walked across the barnyard to the tables where the graves registration men had already gathered silently, white cotton masks around their necks, shovels ready. The toothless old farmer noticed her as she passed the well, a new steel bucket in his hands. He nodded toward the barn. Eleanor sloshed her way through the maze of puddles to the place where her friend mourned.
VI
VENEZUELA
MAY 1924
Lake Maracaibo sits like a keyhole on the Venezuelan coastline. That year, the first of an army of mechanical men stood guard on its eastern brim, the waterborne oil derricks of the East Bolívar coastal field, their drill motors muttering in the distance, sinking new wells deep under the shimmering lake’s surface.
Standard Oil’s VIP protocol barge lolled at the company’s mooring, the oilmen gathered there beneath a big rectangular tent of mosquito netting dead amidships, the sighing canvas sunshade fluttering languidly.
As the oil minister, Marichal y Falcón, had written Foster, the lake had prospects, “a modern and profitable refinery in keeping with your client’s prestige and dedication to Venezuelan production.” Despite two years’ prospecting and drilling, Standard, the Rockefeller oil giant, had barely a toehold on the huge lake’s submerged oil pools.
Foster had demanded a round table for the breakfast meeting; he and Marichal y Falcón sat across from each other in the soft shade. Marichal was a collection of circles, from his face to his belly, a swarthy lipless specimen, barely five foot six, much given to rapid-fire blinkings, like semaphore, while he listened. John D. Rockefeller Jr. himself and his son, Nelson, cutting his milk teeth on this transaction, both immaculate in their best linen whites, sat to Foster’s right, with Señor Julio Cardozo, Foster’s almost boneless translator, to his left. Next, the narrow-eyed Señor Carlos Ruíz-Bacart, the oil ministry’s reptilian lawyer, completed the table.
The senior Rockefeller cleared his throat. “Look, we don’t want to hear about problems at the registry office, Señor Minister. We came here expecting to perfect title on that parcel so we can get this operation producing. We don’t like delays. We like the sound of drilling.”
Foster gathered from Marichal’s blinkings that he understood far more English than he allowed, even as the minister waited for Cardozo to finish translating. Marichal kept his hands over the crest of his belly as he spoke, his gaze fixed slightly over Foster’s head. “Here we have many ‘coyotes,’ unfortunately,” Cardozo translated, “unscrupulous men who prefer to prospect at the registry office rather than for oil. There remains the problem with a missing heir on the Espinosa tract. These people are migrant fishermen—they are very difficult to find. I beg you to understand this.” Marichal nodded while Cardozo spoke.
Catching Rockefeller’s eye, Foster thanked Marichal, then upped the ante. “Señor Marichal, surely you’re aware of your reputation in the United States?”
Marichal froze the half smile he wore, wary.
“Then I shall tell you, señor,” Foster went on. “You are an engine of high speed and power housed in a small body. This is your reputation. Yes, delays are against your industrious nature. I understand this, my client understands this. We expect good news. Soon.”
Marichal looked pained, but his hands never moved, only his eyes, marking the silent Nelson waiting in the wings. He replied directly to Rockefeller himself. “I understand this … problem, Señor Rockefeller,” he said meaningfully, in sound English. “I shall resolve the situation. Positively. I will need a few more weeks.”
The senior Rockefeller, apparently mollified for the moment, raised his palms in agreement. But his son’s cool stare, Foster noticed, never left the minister’s. Nelson glanced at Foster and gave a short sharp nod.
“Shall we move on to the pending legislation regarding shipping rates?” Foster asked. “And perhaps more coffee?”
The negotiations would proceed like this for another hour, he calculated, until they reached the nub of things. Foster sipped at the fierce coffee and scrawled a question mark next to Espinosa tract.
As the clock unwound, agreements followed: road access, railhead concession, a water purification plant upriver for the workers and their families, the usual sidebars to the main event. At quarter past nine, as the sun began its work, the six men took a break, distributing themselves along the barge’s polished rail in telling arrangement. Foster towered over the supple Ruíz-Bacart, set on examining the shoreline where the derricks thrummed. A dozen feet down the rail, Rockefeller and his son had cornered Marichal next to the cabin door.
“The legislature wants a 110 percent royalty rate,” Ruíz-Bacart was saying. “I wish I had better news.”
“We’ll whittle that down,” Foster replied confidently. “Or your senate can say adios to reinvestment.”
“As you know, Señor Dulles, oil in Venezuela flows up, not down,” Ruíz-Bacart replied quietly. “A question?”
Foster nodded and waited, watching Standard’s Fairey floatplane readying for takeoff down the shoreline, a pair of geologists hoisting their kit bags into the big red-on-white biplane. This should be Allen’s work, he decided, this fencing around with ministers and their flunkies.
Ruíz-Bacart leant closer, fitting a cigarette into his pearl holder. “The refinery. What do your clients want?”
“What do you want?” Foster replied. “One way or another, Mr. Rockefeller will get his refinery, here or Aruba. It’s up to Francisco and the boys at the ministry.”
“Aruba, it’s a problem, you know,” Ruíz-Bacart suggested delicately. “More excise, more taxes, more delay.”
Foster waited, a hand shading his eyes, looking at the floatplane in the glare. “Where are they surveying now?”
“The number six field,” Ruíz-Bacart replied. “The surveying is almost over. Core sampling now.” The Venezuelan lawyer sounded wistful, as if recalling a disappointing love affair.
Foster could hear Nelson’s voice, cracking with enthusiasm, as he chided Marichal about the royalty rate. Marichal wasn’t laughing quite so freely now.
“These things require a certain finesse,” Foster observed, looking down at Ruíz-Bacart, captured completely now within his own big square shadow. Foster let his words hang for a moment, then nodded, no more than a tip of the forehead, at the two Rockefellers. “If they go,” Foster warned, “they won’t come back. Marichal understands that?”
Ruíz-Bacart wrinkled his nose. “It’s oil,” Ruíz-Bacart observed. “He understands.”
Foster waited again. “I’m not so sure. Marichal’s in-laws still own the Serrano Bank?”
Ruíz-Bacart scratched his earlobe with a fingertip, then drew deeply on his cigarette. “Yes,” he said, puzzled. “Why?”
In the distance the big biplane revved up and began taxiing along the smooth water, turning head-on into the slight west wind.
“Because if Marichal doesn’t close this East Bolivar deal by Friday at the end of business,” Foster reported calmly, “they’re going to buy the bank and fire every last Serrano director. Today’s Tuesday and Marichal’s new at this, so we’re giving him four days. If Marichal doesn’t sign the Espinosas, that means Marichal’s got one unhappy wife come Monday. And if that doesn’t get your minister off his duff—”
“Duff? What is duff?” Ruíz-Bacart inquired, miserable, his narrow eyes as wide as they could go.
“His rear end,” Foster replied. “If that doesn’t get Francisco moving, I can tell you Marichal’s going to get a telephone call at that swank office of his from the financial ministry that’ll make him wish he never heard of Manuel Espinosa and parcel twenty-eight. Because,” Foster said, raising his voice as the approaching seaplane’s engine grew louder, “all the Espinosas in Caracas won’t be able to buy up the Venezuelan treasury bonds my clients are going to dump by noon Monday. Get the picture? First the bank, then the bonds.” Foster placed a paternal hand on Ruíz-Bacart’s thin shoulder. “We clear?”
The Venezuelan lawyer hadn’t moved. He licked his lips and, very carefully, pinched the burning end off his cigarette then tapped the stub from his holder and into the water, his face drawn. “What is the desired result?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
“Two million barrels a day and Royal Dutch Shell out the door, Carlos,” Foster said. “That’s the desired result.”
Ruíz-Bacart’s lips were moving, but he might have been mute for all it mattered. Foster heard only the floatplane’s rising scream as it thundered across the barge’s bows, its wings trembling with the effort, dispensing parabolas of spray and a cheery wave from the goggled geologists, Standard’s gallant flying prospectors, secure in their success on the lake that gurgled oil.
The Witness Tree Page 6