Suddenly she missed Michael. It had been folly to bring him but it was what she had wanted, that he see what would happen to her, that he be nearby. Then they would truly be bound. They would begin again. Because his situation was so like hers, the two of them together were no accident.
She began wandering naked through the rooms with a flashlight, then, hearing servants somewhere in the house, she put on a terrycloth robe. For a moment she thought she heard rain on the leaves outside, but it was only the wind rattling kapok branches against a metal roof.
She went along the second-floor patio hallway to John-Paul's room. The door was unlocked; she pushed it open and played her beam on the vevers painted on the walls and on the inlaid chests stacked on the floor. She moved the circle of light into the corners of the room. There were drawings she had not seen before, even woven vevers of gods she did not know. None of it had been there the last time she had seen his bedroom. It was as though someone had devised a secret wake in the room where he had died. Around the windows and on top of the framed pictures on the walls were branches of a plant she did not recognize, fragrant with a biting, musky smell.
Farther along, her beam fixed on glowing eyes. A man crouched in one corner of the room. He looked excited, he smiled. Perhaps only guilty and surprised. When he stood up she recognized him as a man named Armand. He had been a boat builder and worked as a handyman at the habitation.
"Madame," he said, laughing.
She thought he seemed unsound. She had always known him to be a sensible man who was said to be a Jehovah's Witness.
"What's this?" she asked him, pointing to the strange vevers.
"Bizango," he said, his smile draining away.
It was a word one rarely heard, the name of a secret society to which John-Paul was said to belong. People feared it. She wondered if her soul in Marinette's custody had any connection with bizango.
"But Armand. You didn't put these here?"
"No, madame," the old man said.
Outside, a vehicle pulled up in front of the house. She went to the balcony rail and shone her light behind the headlights. Roger Hyde was driving one of the camouflage jeeps from the lodge. There were two white men in the rear seat, in uniforms that matched the jeep's coloration. She thought they must be Colombian milicianos. They did not care to be illuminated; they shouted at her until she moved the beam away. One pointed his weapon. She shut off the light and heard Roger coming up the outside stairway, moving more quickly than was his custom.
"Lara?"
"I'm here, Roger. What's wrong?"
He took her hand.
"Be cool, sweetheart. We lost the plane. It went down over the reef."
"Oh my God. Oh Roger." She put a hand to her face. "And the pilot?"
"The pilot bought it, poor guy," Roger said. "And poor us because the Colombians are here from Rodney. They're not happy."
"But they can't blame us."
Roger smiled unhappily. "They have to blame someone, Lara."
"Do we have to go to the lodge?"
"They want us at the lodge. It's going to be difficult. The woman they sent is very" — he shrugged—"difficult." He was more upset than she ever remembered him being.
While they were driving to the lodge, veering onto the shoulder, dodging holes in the road, dodging the talus around them, she asked, "Roger, you must tell me about bizango."
He made a noise like laughter. "There may come a time I'll do that, baby. Not now."
"You're scaring me."
"You haven't done anything wrong to anyone," Roger said. "Remember that."
That could not be true, she thought. She was not reassured.
14
THE FACTOR was a yellowing man in a blue plaid shirt who sat behind a counter near the street entrance to a disorderly shop of some sort. The place had a sharp smell of tobacco and of a bitter liquor that stung the eyes. A second door at the back led to a courtyard where men were offloading sacks from a battered truck.
Michael introduced himself.
"How did you travel?" the rusty-looking man asked him.
"On the bus," Michael told him.
"Yes?"
"Oh," Michael added. "To the east." That was the formula by which he understood Masons recognized each other in Fort Salines. He thought it might apply. "Yep. Eastward. To the east."
It was apparent the yellowing man understood nothing of what Michael was trying to convey. Nevertheless he presented a card that declared him to be Edouard Ashraf.
"Was it beautiful?" he asked. "No? Aha." He seemed pleased. "From the capital? No one comes that way."
"It was all right," Michael said. "Of course I was stuck there all day and half the night."
The Factor looked genuinely sympathetic.
The bus had left him in darkness a few minutes before dawn. His night ride had been fraught with Creole whispers, laughter that included him out. Then, on his arrival, a market had assembled around him in the sudden morning light of the northern city. The sea was nearby, a joyous dazzle. The mountain range over which he had come erupted from deep green shadow. He had been dreading day, the prospect of standing alone there, tropical sun lighting the blood guilt of his skin. But then it had seemed all right.
Factor Ashraf's yellowness was unsettling. Whatever jaundice he harbored had spread over his eyes, soaked the whites and stained his eyeballs. His skin appeared the color of lined foolscap. Together with the shock of blondish hair that rose mysteriously from his lemon scalp like a wick, it made him look to Michael like a wax santo. It was all, he assured himself, his fatigue, hypnagogic hallucinatory impressions. But the vertigo he could not shake off was a kind of sensory infection. As though there were really some rough magic everywhere.
"I was told you could direct me to the Bay of Saints Hotel," Michael said. Cautiously, he glanced around but the little shop was empty. On the dusty shelves, packages wrapped in twine were stacked beside medicine bottles that looked a century old. The bottles contained liquids that ranged in color from water-clear to factor-colored saffron to amber.
"I thought it was a different man. An American."
"Well," Michael said, "that's me."
"You're Michael?"
"Yes. Michael."
"You have to be careful," the Factor told him.
"Yes," Michael said. "Have you seen my friend?"
"It's unsafe," said the Factor, ignoring his question. "On certain days it is unwise to leave the city. Beware after dark. Avoid the poorest districts." He spoke as if by rote.
"I understand," Michael said. "I'll be careful."
"Maybe your soldiers will help you."
"Really," Michael said, "I hope it doesn't come to that."
He promptly told Michael the way to his hotel. It was, he said, within walking distance and could be safely walked.
In the market there were butchered dogfish for sale along with barrels of squirming creatures, living tangles of antennae and tentacles among bloody chopped shell. Cockles and mussels, cones and mandibles and trilobites. Everything was wet, slick, bright, stinking and attended by flies. Women wielding box cutters opened crates full of electrical batteries, spools of thread. Little groups of children wandered from stall to stall, unsmiling and silent. Only a few begged listlessly.
"Money," they murmured softly. "Lajan, blan."