Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Dolan shook his head and grinned, easing the tension between them. Dorothy Kovacevic.

You can’t expect me to believe that.

Born and christened Dorothy Kovacevic.

Oh, Christ, that’s awful, said Tom. That’s like a brand name for old women in Chicago. Dorothys wore shapeless blue wool coats. Babushkas tied under hairy chins. Breath rank with stewed cabbage.

I guess she felt that way, too. Her family and friends called her Dottie. Mother was from the Midwest — Kansas, Missouri, one of those . . that might explain Dorothy. Her father was Croatian, immigrated after the war, ended up in the diplomatic corps. But Dorothy Kovacevic isn’t her real name, either. When she was still a toddler, the father legally changed the family name to Chambers. Has a nice all-American ring to it, I guess was the point.

Dottie fits. So, why Jacqueline Scott?

Why Renee Gardner? said Dolan, not looking to Tom for the answer, but explaining that Renee Gardner was the name she had used on her marriage license to his client.

Tom was flummoxed by what seemed to be a private and complicated joke — the surplus of names, this strange proliferation of make-believe. Dottie, Jackie, Renee . . Get it?

No.

He knew more than one person who had cried Time’s up! on whoever they happened to be at some stage in their lives, the season of their happiness shifting underneath them. A salesman who wanted to be a doctor, a mother who no longer wanted to be a mother, Tom himself a journalist who walked off the beat and out of the newsroom and went to law school, but none of them changed their names every time they changed their minds about who they were. Yet there was in him a general sense of women in constant passage from one identity to the next, starting with their own biology. Could a woman even recall a self without breasts and hips, or remember loving the firmness of those breasts and hips after the trial of childbirth or the malfunctioning furnace of menopause. Every woman he had ever known who woke up one day sick and tired of something in her life by lunchtime had lopped off her hair for the superficial relief of becoming someone else. The daily cosmetic painting and repainting of identity seemed to create a psychic disconnect between who a woman was and who she needed to be in her dissatisfaction with herself, and how, in the midst of all this flux and fabrication, the redirection and repackaging and metamorphosis, was a man supposed to hold a clear idea of who any woman, even the one closest to him, was? And yet to know a woman too well . . was that a greater or lesser option? There were good answers, Tom knew, and answers that were very, very bad.

Who does that? he wanted Connie Dolan to tell him. Who needs so many aliases?

Dolan peered at him not unkindly and told Tom he had been around the block enough to know the answer — criminals, cons, crazy people. Actors, spies, strippers. Runaways. Refugees.

Harrington’s first reaction was to resist these categories but he sighed and said, So which was she?

You tell me.

Maybe none of the above.

Maybe all of the above.

Come on, Tom snorted. A stripper?

I’m serious, my friend.

She was a lost soul.

What the fuck’s a lost soul? That’s everybody and nobody. We’re all lost souls, are we not? Let me ask you this — do you believe in original sin?

No. What kind of question is that?

You’d be better off if you did. Because then the governing principle in your life would be the rising up, not the falling down. Repair and improvement. You see what I’m saying?

But Tom ignored Connie Dolan’s barstool theology except to say that Jackie — he could not think of her as other than Jackie — traveled with an entourage of demons and so maybe, said Tom, taking quite a leap, her death was a mercy killing, an exorcism, maybe she welcomed her death, the fucked-up bitch — anyway, that was Tom’s theory on his third round of rum sours and Dolan stared at Tom with a derisive smile bunched to one side of his mouth and said, What a load of shit, and went to his room to shower before dinner. Harrington moved to the poolside bar and watched the darkness seep down the mountain into the city and the lights, one by one, make it lovely.

I usually don’t drink so much, Tom said, coming late to breakfast on the sunny terrace where Dolan, more casually dressed than the day before — polo shirt, blue jeans, running shoes; the meringue of his hair damply flattened — stabbed sections of papaya from a bowl of fruit salad.

I usually do, said Connie Dolan.

Monsieur, Harrington called to a waiter walking past. Café, s’il vous plaît. Omelette avec jambon et fromage. Turning back toward Dolan he asked, What’s the plan?

They had not talked about a plan at dinner but instead Tom had pushed his griot around on his plate in a fog of rum and occasionally listened to Dolan’s tales of his eight years with the Bureau in Puerto Rico, locking up miscreants and vermin, until Tom had abruptly held up his hand for him to stop and said he wanted to know how Dolan had discovered that he had an association with Jacqueline Scott. Dolan said he had read it in a report, and Tom, of course, did not take this information well — he could vaguely recollect shouting; oh, Christ, he wasn’t shouting, was he? — at Dolan, who made no attempt to calm him down but said sympathetically that there wasn’t much there. Just two or three lines alleging that, in 1996, Thomas Harrington, a human rights lawyer under a UN-funded contract to the Haitian government, and the deceased (Dorothy, Jackie, Renee) had traveled together to the northwestern cantonment of Limbé and, in the vicinity of the village of Bois Caïman, had been involved in an altercation of unclear nature with followers of the alleged gang leader, Jacques Lecoeur. Tom was speechless and finally croaked, That’s it? feeling a bolt of panic and then another bolt of paranoia shoot through the rum, and Dolan had eyed him curiously and said, That’s it.

There was nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary about the existence of the report itself, which had been copied at the American embassy in Port-au-Prince and passed to Dolan by an old friend of his in the Miami office of the Bureau — PIs were dead in the water if they couldn’t rely on old friends in law enforcement or the clerks of the court. The parties involved in the murder were American citizens and, after interviewing his client in Florida, the Bureau had sent a team of agents to Haiti to figure things out, but they botched it, said Dolan, they were dumber than pet rabbits, they didn’t talk to the coroner, they didn’t talk to the cops who took her body away that night, they never bothered to take a look at the car, and they resurfaced in Miami forty-eight hours later with much the same information with which they had started.

At that moment, though, Tom Harrington had no interest in who had killed Jackie or why. All he wanted to know was who was the source of this report and how had he ended up in it. Dolan said it wasn’t anything to worry about. When the agent had interviewed his client in the federal lockup in Miami, his client had suggested that his wife had an enemy or two in Haiti, and that the Bureau should talk to a driver named Gerard Hurbon, and although the Feds did track down Gerard, who subsequently named Tom Harrington and mentioned Tom’s trip up north with the girl, they never pursued the lead, according to Dolan, because they already had fallen in love with the scenario of least resistance to their limited capacity to operate in a place like Haiti. Here was a guy who had arranged a contract killing of his wife for what else but the money, and chosen Haiti as the venue for the crime because who was ever getting to the bottom of anything in Haiti.