Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Dolan wanted Tom to teach him how to greet a person in Kreyol.

Como yé? How are you, how’s it going? They’ll answer, Na’p boulé . We’re boiling, we’re on fire.

On the ground, inundated by the mundane details of arrival, Tom felt grateful for Dolan’s composure, his affable patience with inefficient procedure, and saw for himself that Dolan was a man who glided easily into the muddle. They shouldered their bags through customs and, outside in the steam bath, pressed themselves into the scrum of need that surrounded the terminal, a thick ring of suffocating humanity that began to percuss with Harrington’s name. TumTumTum.

Yes, he had been gone too long. Yes, I remember you and you but just as before I am not your savior. No, he had not brought this one shoes, that one a visa.

The sooner you relinquished yourself to somebody, the sooner you could reclaim control, and in the thicket of grabbing hands he selected two boys with familiar faces to carry their luggage across the street to the bare cinder-block building that housed the car rental agencies. The two became four became six and followed behind in a quarrelsome knot, each boy tugging at the bags, each loud boy demanding payment at the door through which they could not enter, each boy merrily given a crisp dollar bill by Dolan.

I see you speak the universal language of shakedown, Tom said wryly, nodding at Dolan’s gold-plated money clip before it disappeared back into his pocket, and Dolan smiled at the illusion of his largesse, a good-natured businessman taking care of his staff. For the first time Tom wondered if he should consider himself Dolan’s employee; he hadn’t thought about it beyond their gentleman’s agreement — Dolan would pay expenses, the ticket, food and lodging, but beyond that there was no arrangement and Harrington supposed he could stay or go as he wished. They did seem to be in agreement about which rental company to use.

Sir, we thought you had forgotten us, the lugubrious counter agent said with wounded dignity, putting his slack hand in Tom’s, as though the white man were another disappointment to his day.

I did, he confessed.

We have not forgotten you.

No, I wouldn’t think so. Tom had managed to return one of his agency’s vehicles in very bad condition and another with bullet holes through a door panel. How are things? he asked.

We are enjoying the freedom you give us, the agent said, to go to hell. This democracy you give Haiti is killing us.

Tom handed the agent his driver’s license and Dolan’s credit card and a minute later Dolan looked up from the form he was signing and Harrington watched his methodical style come into focus, the script of investigative habits that he understood existed between them as both fraternal bond and ground for competition, brotherly or not. Tell me something, said Dolan, setting his briefcase on the counter, flipping the latches without opening it, and Tom listened to his conversation with the rental agent, whose expression hardened warily as he realized the white man in front of him was a type of policeman. The briefcase opened. Oui, said the agent, examining Dolan’s copy of an invoice; he was the one who had rented the SUV to the American couple several weeks ago. True, the woman was murdered, the vehicle stolen and left a short distance off the road near the swamps of Tintayen. Everyone knew these things, monsieur.

And the man and the woman, said Dolan. Tell me your impression of them.

I had no impression.

Happy, sad, irritated, friendly?

Normal.

Dolan reached back into his briefcase and extracted a brown envelope containing a photograph of the client with his wife, the two of them side by side, lovers in bathing suits, his arm clasped around her suntanned shoulder, posed in front of a giant concrete reproduction of a conch shell that Harrington recalled having seen among the garden of landscaping kitsch at Moulin Sur Mer. Let me see that, Tom said, and took the photograph from Dolan as he pushed it across the counter toward the agent.

Harrington released an involuntary gasp. What’s the problem? asked Dolan, and he gave Tom a hard look, studying his reaction. You okay?

I’m fine, he said, trying to stand straight and breathe normally. I know this woman. Jackie. Jacqueline Scott. A blade of grief twisted into Harrington and through him and then, replaced by arid pity, out, perhaps the only honest emotion he had ever felt for her besides lust and anger, perhaps the only two responses a woman like Jackie could expect from a man once she had his undivided attention.

That’s not her name, said Dolan.

All right, he said, steadying himself. Her hair’s cut different, and it’s been dyed, but I know her. She was freelancing here during the occupation.

I was hoping you’d say that, said Dolan.

You knew? Harrington’s along-for-the-ride equanimity drained into a chilling emptiness and he felt entrapped, his world contracting into Dolan’s, and for a moment on the edge of his consciousness he was aware of a doubling into a second self, his first self receding into the psychic numbing he knew so very well from his years of graveside interviews but had never, not even at the unearthing of a stadium filled with bones, experienced at a depth where everything, all the madness and pain, is meant to disappear. He was sick in the revolting airless heat of the room, on the threshold of a lifelong haunting.

No, I didn’t know, Dolan said. I knew it was a possibility.

Well, shit, he said, his mouth watering, and a foulness at the top of his throat as if he might vomit; he spit on the floor to try to stop the sensation. Back in Miami, Tom had not been clever in his appraisal of the retired special agent, imagining that Dolan, always talking, one anecdote after another, a stream of true-crime monologues, wanted Tom along just to have someone to attend his stories, drive the car, pick the restaurants, make everything easy.

I was thinking, Tom said, the next time somebody invites me along on a trip, I might ask for more particulars.

I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d come if I spelled it out up front.

You were right.

When Tom Harrington calmed down, he allowed that if Dolan’s client did not kill his wife, whatever her name was, then perhaps there was a small chance that maybe he knew who did, and Connie Dolan was expecting Tom to say that, too.

In the final days of the occupation, a Hollywood director came to Port-au-Prince as a special guest of the National Palace to celebrate the great success of democracy and the inauguration of the new president, swept into office by an election free and fair in which no one felt inspired to actually vote. The director, whose work had earned him an Academy Award, had loaned his celebrity to Haiti’s cause; he had championed the refugees washing ashore in Florida, lobbied Congress, raised funds, advised the president-in-exile, spoken out at rallies in Boston and New York and Miami and, with his documentaries, had shown the world the reason for his outrage and his broken heart — the brutalities of the tyrants, the blood of the innocents. His crusade had been noble and for that he was welcomed and loved in the wasteland, and Tom Harrington himself had admired him, and still did.

The director was part of the scene and, to a less public degree, so was Tom and Tom wasn’t entirely surprised, the afternoon before the inauguration, to receive a message at the desk of the Hotel Oloffson where he kept a small apartment, inviting him that evening to dinner with the director and his group. After a shower and a change of clothes he descended to the bar to listen to the day’s scrapings from the correspondents who regularly gathered there to decompress — most would be leaving the country by week’s end — and at the appointed hour drove himself up the darkening mountain, following its sluggish river of traffic and black exhaust, to the once luxurious suburb of Petionville and the gingerbread coziness of the Kinam Hotel.