Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

How was what, sir?

I couldn’t get there, you know. His mother went. Ah, that reminds me, Chambers continued but stopped, a fleeting panic in his eyes until the thought came skipping back and he reached across the seat, his fingers alighting on Burnette’s knee and then springing away like startled birds, Burnette reeling at the sight of the unclipped index and middle fingernails on Chambers’s right hand, their extraordinary womanish length, like a Chinese emperor’s. There’s something I must show you. Something of great importance. Don’t let me forget, Ev.

Yes, sir.

Later, said Chambers, oddly relieved, it appeared, of an unspoken burden. Remind me.

His attention shifted, filling with delight, to the city and for ten minutes he talked nonstop, pointing out landmarks, sites that had been shelled in the latest conflict, attaching vivid anecdotes to buildings and neighborhoods and monuments, at one point leaning forward to tap Scarecrow on the shoulder, mistaking him for a national, addressing him in Croatian, Crow telling him, I don’t speak that, sir, Burnette confronted with yet another riddle that slowly turned to revelation — apparently the undersecretary had spent some part of his childhood in Zagreb during World War Two.

Then Chambers’s mood evanesced and he fell silent for a few moments and his gaze turned dreamy. You’ve been to Brussels, right? he said finally to no one in particular. Best moules on the planet.

Another extended pause and then a pronouncement, his voice enthusiastic, tallyho, as if the answer to a trivia question had popped into his head.

Maintain your convictions!

Yes, sir.

Ev, that man is an asshole.

Okay.

That’s not the problem, you see. The problem is he’s a mujo -lover. No good will come of it.

They were slowing down behind a processional line of vehicles as they approached the main entrance to the presidential palace. Burnette commo-checked his team’s wiring, the cuff mics and earbuds, and began to rehearse the in-and-out details and timing, not solely for the undersecretary’s benefit — Bill, the add-on to their detail from State, needed to hear it; straight routine for Scarecrow and Burn, this was SOP — but it brought a fiery irrational rebuke from Steven Chambers.

I know what to do, goddamn it, he said and Burnette stared at him in cold wonder. Goddamn it, Ev. After all these years.

His voice trailed, something new flooding into his blue eyes, unprecedented in the crossed connection of their relationship, at least to Burnette, Chambers showing what he made a point of never showing. Brokenness, pain.

You don’t understand, said Chambers. I’m here again to bury my father.

The pager on Burnette’s belt jiggled as they passed through the palatial gates, the undersecretary defying Eville, lowering his window to wave at a mournful crowd roped behind the cordon of police and soldiers, the people animated by their glimpse of Chambers, burbling with reverent noise — it would be wrong to call it cheering — for a native son’s return. Up through the evergreened knolls to the esplanade of paving stones, its red carpet and ceremonial guard, at the front of the motorcade now, Scarecrow placing the transmission in park, Vasich’s valet opening the undersecretary’s door. Eville glanced at the screen of his upgraded model as he exited the vehicle to lope to the undersecretary’s side, hitting the wrong keys until he hit the right one, reading the text message from Ben, Green light. Bring Arnie home.

He remembered — Yeah, Arnie, right. Call me Arnie.

What’s he got? Scarecrow had asked the other day. That Alzheimers crud? The neurological term was multi-infarcted dementia, diminishing mental capacity signaled by intermittent cognitive blips and ruts due to a years-long series of tiny aneurysms, micro-explosions in the brain, too minuscule to be consciously experienced by the person being rerouted toward an impending abyss.

Arnie, strokes, Christ . It was too much. Christ’s chosen one, handpicked by the Lord to serve as the supreme allied commander for Armageddon, going eighteen holes with the devil and a play-off round of sudden death. Says Lucifer, How many strokes you giving me, Arnie? Zap, zap. Keep ’em coming, my boy.

Inside the unheated glassed expanse of the palace, in a pale reception hall dim with dispirited light seeping through the plates of floor-to-ceiling windows, the air redolent with the viscid smell of Easter lilies, the receiving line looked to Burnette’s uncongenial eye like a tenth reunion of the politburo. Severe jowly ministers in fedoras and felt overcoats that hung off their frames like Mongolian yurts; the high command of pigeon-breasted generals in uniforms of a cheap-looking green, plastered with medals and Croix de Guerre and campaign ribbons, their faces shadowed beneath large caps with peaked crowns; foreign dignitaries from across the Euro-zone and Eastern bloc who in their collective countenance openly displayed the belief that greatness could not accrue without a heavy investment in pomposity; the preening criminals subcontracted to nail a shell of drywall over the wreckage of Yugoslavia. Burnette walked a pace back, at the undersecretary’s side along the long row of powerful men, acutely aware of his own unesteemed status. He had accepted his place in the order of the world long ago but something about today, in the presence of this critical mass of assembled pharaohs, rankled Burnette so that he had to remind himself that what he one day might give his life for was both more abstract yet more real than men such as these, men who killed and conquered but more pervasively corrupted, degrading the value of the blood they had spilled.

They had come to Vasich, the undersecretary and the general embracing, exchanging a double kiss, Vasich’s shining eyes meeting Burnette’s with a warning, his chin gesturing toward a high-ranking Canadian blue cap who a minute later asked to speak with Burnette and he looked to the end of the line and made a guess. I can give you thirty seconds, he said, motioning for Bill to assume his place, and stepped aside with the UN officer, affiliated he said with the peacekeeping mission’s legal office, who confided, Heads up. There are some fellows from The Hague in town. I wouldn’t like to see anything ugly happen. What is it exactly that can happen? asked Burnette. For instance, said the officer, there’s some talk about the tribunal’s subpoena power. Can’t happen, said Burnette. No jurisdiction. Diplomatic immunity. American. Untouchable. Tell them not to waste their time.

There’s a hitch, said the Canadian as Burnette began to slide away to rejoin his detail. It seems your undersecretary has dual citizenship. Honorary, of course, but I understand there’s some legitimacy to it that could be tested.

Not on my watch, said Burnette.

He returned to position, Bill resumed his tail, the line ended and the moment arrived for the undersecretary to pay his last respects to the republic’s hero, beloved architect of freedom and democracy, the former partisan Davor Starevica. Burnette and Crow remained where they were as the undersecretary took three steps forward to the raised open casket, flanked by the striped flags of sovereignty, red-white-blue, emblazoned with the republic’s checkerboard coat of arms, a matched set of rock-faced soldiers as honor guard, Chambers peering inside the coffin with an incongruous pleasant smile, the dead man a disfigured gnomish fossil being buried in the bag of his uniform, four stars upon each shoulder board. Chambers bent in to press a kiss upon the corpse’s opalescent forehead, reached into his own inner pocket, then wrapped an ivory-beaded rosary around the lifelong atheist’s unpliable skeleton hands. The undersecretary looked daftly beatific, stepping back, straightening his spine, saluting and tottering away to become part of the line himself until the last dignitary had filed past and the casket was closed and flag-draped, lifted by the pallbearers and carried out to the hearse for its farewell journey through the drizzle of the city’s sorrow.