The surface faintly lit with lovely moonlight was up there, a dream, a distant notion. But now he was in the real world, the water one, and he was drowning like all the others. One with the million million water bozos, blue bathing beauties, Phoenician sailors and narcotrafficking pilotos, all the other airless losers beneath the undulating sparkle of the briny deep. Fear illuminated him, lit him up. The loss of heaven and the pains of hell. The crushing pain, unbearable, the bindings slicing off his arms and legs. In his personal eternity he waited, waited for air, and he was dead, for it was not forthcoming. He dropped one of the cases and saw it spin down out of sight.
Then suddenly, in one violent moment it was all different. But it was not death, it was light, it was air. He saw the dim cabin lights of the dive boat and the huddled shadows of the men aboard it. Unawares, he inflated the swelling BC and ripped the regulator away from his drowned face.
When he breathed there was nothing. No relief, no air. How was it possible? He was on the surface. He had broached, it seemed to him, like a Polaris missile. His addled consciousness bore a moment of memory in which he looked down on the dive boat from the cruising altitude of a hot-air balloon, the killer balloon he had ridden to the surface. He took another famished lungful. Nada, rien. A heart attack, he thought. Or some drowner's dream. On the third try he knew he was breathing, the old plant back in motion. But he had come up too fast.
So he waited next for the agony, the bends, an embolism. It turned out he was fine, more or less. He floated, holding his two recovered packages like rescued babes. Roger was shouting at him over the sound of the water against the hull, shouts that were hoarse whispers. Hippolyte was beside him in the dark. He knew perfectly well who they were. He raised his mask to his forehead and breathed to his heart's content. Eventually he was able to speak.
"I'm not going down there again," he told them.
17
THERE WAS SOME unpleasantness over the lost case but eventually they headed back to the landing of the Purcell house.
"It goes down to eight miles, Roger. It's gone."
When they were halfway back Michael asked him what was in the cases.
"Objets d'art. Artifacts for sale. In fact," Roger said, "they were already purchased, which is why I'm upset."
"I really am sorry, Roger. It's a miracle I was able to get the two of them."
"Our customers are not pious. They may not be grateful."
Michael wondered briefly how their ingratitude affected him, but he did not ask any more questions. Nor did he ask any questions about Lara. He had followed her to the ranks of death; that was where his encounter with the late pilot had placed him. On that ocean, he thought, in that darkness he had no friends.
Finally Hippolyte took Michael back to the dive shop. Roger had debarked at the Purcell house landing. Hippolyte, young and inexperienced at docking, made something of a commotion at the dive pier. The two small children he had left in the shop were still there, asleep. Hippolyte stayed long enough to help Michael out of his wetsuit and check the compressors. Then he took his toddlers by the hand and disappeared into the night.
Michael walked the distance to the hotel in a kind of despair. More than anything he wanted to be with Lara. At the same time he felt that he had lost her. She had betrayed him into a different world than the one they were meant to share.
Coming up the back stairs he ran into Liz McKie, the journalist.
"Where were you, Michael? Were you out on the reef?"
"Are you kidding?"
"I heard a boat." She put a presuming hand beside his ear. "You look wet."
He moved his head away. "I… was in the water. Just on an impulse."
"You don't say."
"I've been hearing drums all night," Michael said.
"We've had a lot of drums for sure. It's the retirer for John-Paul Purcell. They're marking that at the lodge. Didn't Lara tell you that?"
"She did say something about it."
"Did she tell you about the lodge?"
"I don't know anything about the lodge. I've never been there."
She stared at him, eager and confused. Her eyes were wide with excitement and fear. "Hey, Michael, tell me. What's going on, buddy?"
"I don't know. Really."
He wanted very much to ask her whether she was afraid of the story she was trying to write and the people she was trying to write about. He let it go.
She smiled as though she were sorry for him and went away. There were soldiers milling around the patio of the hotel when he got there. No one was in attendance at the desk. A couple of the soldiers were passing a bottle of four-star rum, making a halfhearted effort to sneak it.
Having no one to provide him a destination, he went into his room without turning on the light and lay down on the bed. The rhythm of the drums had changed but there still seemed to be four, pursuing one another's beat, never stopping. The ocean he could see through the window gave no promise of morning.
18
THE TEMPLE, the hounfor where Lara danced, was constructed of leaves and branches, leaning against the Masonic lodge. In its center, running from the earth floor to the roof, was the twisting, snake-shaped pole, the poto mitan. Around it Lara and about twenty serviteurs connected with the Purcell family were dancing the ceremony of reclamation for Lara's brother.
They faced a leaf-and-branch wall all inset with niches where bottles were stored. The painted bottles were decorated with glitter and worked with spines of tin. These govi contained souls, some those of the living, others souls of the dead. The bright, thick-fleshed leaves reflected the firelight.
The drums beat without stopping for John-Paul, each one enclosing its own spirit: ogan of iron and brass, and maman, petite, rouler, seconde. Four fires burned around the poto mitan, which enclosed the celestial serpent, Dambala. The songs called on Papa Legba, the loa of the crossroads, and on Baron Samedi, the loa of the dead. The drums played all night and Lara had been dancing most of the night with them.
From time to time, the mambo offered her more rum and brought the sacramental cloth, adorned with a vever of the god. The wall of painted glass where she danced was heaped with blossoms — different flowers for different forces, thorned bougainvillea and sour apple for the forces of bizango that John-Paul had served. Then frangipani, poinciana, loblolly pitch apple and myrtle. Different blossoms stood for rada, others for petro. For Marinette, flowering geiger. Above all, Lara was hoping and dreading that Marinette would come.
"John-Paul," she prayed, "if you are back from the sea, if you are safe from Guinee, make Marinette give back my soul."
From inside the lodge building someone shouted at her. It was a woman called Hilda, who was waiting inside with two Colombian milicianos. Lara walked out of the firelight into the half-darkness around the lodge. Hilda took Lara by the shoulders.
"You look stoned, little girl," the woman said.
Lara looked away. The woman pursued her, trying to keep and hold her eye.
"It was good, eh? I hope El Trip told you what happens to you if you try and cheat us. See if your spooks can help you."
One of the milicianos said something in Spanish. Until then he had been repeating "Hay que matarlos," urging no quarter.