Robert Stone - Bay of Souls

"Sit down, Michael," she said. She introduced the officer, Colonel Junot, and took the paper.

"Nothing about you, Boonsie," she told her friend.

"Keeping a low profile," he told Michael with a wink. "I am the stealth candidate, slowly slowly slowly sneaking behind the throne." He made a weasel of his hand and slinked it across the table. He wore a Rolex. "Anyhow," he told McKie, "I'm giving you exclusives. I'm gonna appear dramatically in your eyewitness accounts. Amazing America!"

"Not too dramatically, OK? And," she said, "I think we should call my accounts firsthand instead of eyewitness. Eyewitness suggests you've seen something awful. Right, Mike?"

Michael agreed.

"How was the beach?" she asked.

"What?"

"The beach. La playa. La plage. That's what you came for, right? The beach?"

"Yes," he said. "But I went for a walk."

"Really, where?" she asked.

"To the edge of town."

"See any American troops?"

"American troops? No."

McKie and Colonel Junot exchanged a look. Then Junot shrugged. "Supposed to be a medical unit at Dajubon. And some Special Ops. They're on our side."

"Yeah," McKie said, "you sure of that, Boonsie?"

"Sure and certain. America forever. You're looking at a veteran of Operation Urgent Fury." He looked at Michael, challenging him. "Never heard of it?"

Michael had heard of it. "The Grenada invasion."

"As a young shavetail, as they say at Fort Benning. Subaltern. I think we came in handy."

"The operation where the navy bombed the madhouse," McKie reminded them. "Friendly fire."

No one said anything for a moment.

"Oh," she said, "listen. Drums. And it's broad daylight."

" Retirer, " the colonel told her. "For John-Paul Purcell. Retirer les morts d'en bas de l'eau. "

McKie spoke as though she were correcting him. " Wete mo danba dlo. "

"Very good," the colonel said. "You're becoming very accomplished, Liz."

Michael, too, listened to the drums.

"So how many you think there are, Mike?" Liz McKie asked him.

"I don't know," he said.

"Four," she told him. She looked impudently at Junot, displaying her knowledge.

"Only four?" Michael asked.

She laid her right hand on the rusting metal tabletop and peeled the drums from her long graceful fingers.

"Four drums," she explained, "for the rites of rada. What you might call the brass is a piece of iron, an ogan." She winked at him. "Listen, Michael!" Her open, long-toothed face looked perfectly happy. "The petite. The seconde. And maman, the big one. Can you hear them?"

"Yes."

"Aren't they good?"

"Yes," he said, "they're good."

"Bigger than us," the colonel said. "Bigger than all of us."

Michael let them buy him drinks until he was dazed again. The prospect of his own room, its drum-haunted silence and darkness and unreassuring light, frightened him. The whole world of otherness was waiting for him there, called up out of the ocean by drums. It was no place for him.

When he went in and turned on the bed lamp, Lara was waiting there for him.

"Michael." She looked pale and tired. "Don't be frightened. Not of me."

His instinct was to hold her and in the next moment he went against her, gathered her up out of the drums. She had been made to be like him and familiar, her swellings and smells — the French soap, her breath, pleasant as a troubadour might claim some little virgin's might be. But she was breathless; she raised her throat from his hands to speak. He was smothering her.

"Oh God, Michael," she said. "You're…"She shook her head and her loose hair, laughed and touched his erection. "You're all engage," she said, in neither English nor French.

"Engage. Engaged."

"Are we engaged, then?"

"Sure," he said, "we're a couple of fiancées."

She sat him down on the bed and leaned into his shoulder. He could not see her face.

"What I have to say is not so good, eh?"

He stroked her glistening hair. He almost laughed at the sad fatefulness with which she spoke. What she had said, he had expected. Maybe telegraphed in the drums, why not?

"I was followed here. Someone is waiting for me to come out. If I don't come out they'll come for me."

For one brief moment he felt humiliated, a mark, the soft center of a gypsy switch, the Murphy game.

"Someone is waiting for you?" he asked lightly. "I thought you owned the hotel. I thought you were with me."

He pushed her back so that they could lie down together. He felt her relax beside him.

"I wish it were a joke," she said. "I lost something I was responsible for. A man's been killed."

He thought about this and said, "You told me no drugs."

"That's what they told me," she said. "Honestly."

"Oh shit," he said.

"They are South Americans," she said. "John-Paul and Roger worked with them and maybe there were drugs."

He laughed unhappily. She sat up.

"Will you not treat me like a criminal? As though I schemed?"

"I think you schemed. I have to think that, understand? Otherwise I'll feel like a total idiot."

"Oh, my dear Michael," she said. "You have to believe me." She was pressed against him. "My scheme was not to hurt anyone, I swear. A worst case happened."

"I keep looking at that door," Michael said. "I keep thinking of your escort."

"They won't come yet," she said.

"What do I have to do, Lara?"

"You have to remember that I really love you. I know what love is, I'm not some crazy person. Maybe someday I'll stop but now I do."

"That's easy," Michael said. "What else?"

"You have to dive a wreck. You have to get three cases out of the aft compartment of a Cessna 185."

He sat silently until he could manage a wan uncalled-for joke. "Cocaine? Can I have some?"

She looked really terrified then.

"To the best of my knowledge," she said, "it is not drugs. I packed some emeralds and some old drawings that may be valuable. It's true the emeralds are being smuggled. I don't care, do you?"

"I'm not sure I have the skills, Lara."

"You dive wrecks in Lake Superior every summer. You can do it."

"Is the pilot in the plane?"

She shrugged. A shrug of sympathy that seemed genuine.

"What if I fuck it up?"

"It's not drugs, remember."

"What if I fuck it up?"

"They'll blame me. And you'll be in danger. You might have to run to the Americans. What can you tell them?"

"I'm not good at running. I thought you were an American citizen."

"I am. But they won't… you know. I'm involved through my family. They won't let me go. Unless I get them the cargo back."

Then she told him more than he wanted to hear. She and Roger had panicked because of the coup. They thought the lodge would be raided; they sent the plane off without checking with them. The South Americans. She was preoccupied with some ceremony involving her brother's soul.

"I don't think we have a chance," Michael said. "I don't know much about this, but that's my feeling. Mind if I ask you an impolite question?"

She blew him an imaginary bubble of impatience, in the French manner.

"You're a diver," he said. "You're very able. Why don't you dive it?"

"I've never done a night dive."

"Can that be true?"

"Never. Or a wreck. I go for the reefs, Michael. For the trip down the wall. God, don't you think I would if I could?"

This is where I have placed myself, he thought. If he did not panic, imagine tortures, if he accepted the consequences of his actions, if he was strong, he might imagine himself a lucky man. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen was cowering on his bed, demanding heroic measures. Life had gone that way. He thought of the man with the wheelbarrow. He listened to the drums.