"Trip has a soft spot for you," Hilda said to Lara. "He thinks you went to bed with El Caballo." She meant Castro. "Is it true? Did he give you an emerald? Did you fuck that son of a whore?"
"Everything happened so fast," Lara said.
She went back; no one stopped her. The drums kept their beat, the fires were burning down. She began to dance again as the first light broke over the Morne. As she danced, she saw Roger Hyde walking on the edge of the airstrip with one of his servant boys. The boy was carrying two cases, one in each hand. One was a rectangular steel trunk, the other was the metal cylinder into which she had put the family's island art collection.
On his way to the lodge, Roger called to her.
She shook her head, and he spoke to the people with her in Creole, asking them if she was in a trance, mounted. They answered excitedly, all speaking at once. Not yet. Not yet, they all said, but it would come soon.
The mambo gave her a slug of raw rum and took one herself and pressed the inlaid banner cloth of Erzule against Lara's sweating forehead. Then she covered Lara's face with it, half suffocating her in rum and perfume that was as raw as the rum. A god, Ghede, told a comic story about stealing the perfume with bizango guile. Everyone clapped for the god, who tipped his tall hat. Everyone was laughing. It was a woman using the voice of an old man. He or she pretended to describe Guinee. Baron Samedi. Baron Kriminel.
Lara kept dancing although she was not under the god's power. She was looking for her brother's spirit in the drum and for her own. The mambo followed her dancing moves like a midwife. Another old woman danced the parody, the mimicry of a midwife. She laughed. "Doupkla," she said to Roger. "Marassa. Twins!"
"Merde," Roger said angrily, which made the mambo laugh heartily.
Some Colombian milicianos came out with lights. More and more the Colombians had been using their own people for security, preferring not to rely on the locals. The milicianos ordered Lara and Roger inside the lodge. Lara tried to keep dancing but Roger took her hard by the hand and led her in.
"It's all right, kid," he said. He released her and took a swallow from a bottle of Barbancourt that stood on a table.
"Why is it all right?" Hilda asked. "I see two cases there. I want three."
The guards reacted like mechanical soldiers. They jammed their magazines forward, looked over their shoulders, spun around their leveled weapons.
"Hay que matarlos!" one said. He disliked negros and fancy blanquitas.
"What is this, Rogerdodger?" Hilda asked. "Que fuckerando?"
"We had her friend make the dive. That we recovered anything at all was" — he stopped for a word and smiled very slightly—"a miracle."
Lara watched the pretty little woman stalk Roger. Her fine Botoxed countenance was suddenly transformed, reduced to a face that was simian and rabid with greed. Or with an imitation of it, a pretend greed more frightening than the real thing. Roger, very frightened, kept his cool. Lara moved to stand beside him.
Roger put the cases on a mahogany table in the meeting room, took out his keys and opened them.
Hilda settled down, went to her briefcase and removed what looked like an order pad.
The first case was divided into drawers, and the drawers contained emeralds. Some of the sections had cut emeralds backed with lined index cards that listed each stone's weight and variety. Some drawers contained loose stones, apparently uncut.
The second, cylindrical case was jammed with matted, soaked sheets, jelled into a single mass by the seawater that had penetrated the tube.
"So," Hilda asked Roger, "que pasa?"
"It was hers," Roger told Hilda, shaking water from the tube. "Mostly watercolors." He reached in and took the sodden cylinder partway out of the case. "And a few canvases. Island work."
"It was mine," Lara said. "And John-Paul's."
Hilda looked at her without speaking.
"Well," she said finally, "that's nice, huh? Art. I like that."
Outside, the brass and iron ogan pulled the rada drums behind it. The rhythm of it was irresistible. A man screamed in a woman's voice. Lara tried to part the edges of her drawings, half listening now for her brother's voice.
"Well, guys," Hilda said, "the one you say you lost is the one we needed to move. This is a tragedy."
"I take the responsibility," Roger said.
Hilda observed him.
"You fuckin' straight about that. No offense."
"I figured I had to get it out of here before the Americans and their friends took over," Roger said. "They already run the capital. It was a risk."
Hilda wiggled as though she were shaking off his arguments.
"Hilda, Lara's friend Michael almost lost his life retrieving this."
"That's great, Roger. But you, me and him" — she put a hand on one of the milicianos—"we are responsible also. You know what I'm saying?"
"I'll make it up," Roger said. "We'll make it up between us."
"What if the shit turns up in Miami?"
It seemed to Lara that Roger was getting his confidence back.
"It isn't going to turn up anywhere, Hilda. It's well and truly deep-sixed. I was right over him."
"What if the guy moved it? Maybe he's down getting it now."
"They'll be combing the bottom, Hilda. Raising the plane. Any hour."
Everyone fell silent. One of the dancers came to the sanctuary window and held up a placard for them to see. It was a red heart with a black star at its center. He moved it to the rhythm of the drums.
"Where is this diver? Who is he anyway, this Michael?" Hilda said. "Why didn't he come here?"
"He didn't come, Hilda, because he's just a friend of Lara's. He's a professor, her boyfriend. He knows nothing about us. He doesn't want to. And the less he knows, the better."
"He's scared to come," Hilda said.
"Wouldn't you be?" Lara asked her.
The man with the starred heart kept moving the placard in front of them as if it were a signal, a sign of something about to happen. But the drums only beat on.
"Let him come here," Hilda said. "Let him tell me about it."
"Hilda," Roger said, "if we were stealing from you, do you think we'd go to all this trouble to deceive you? The plane is down. If we'd left it there, you'd be out everything."
The man with the star and heart began to tap on the window to get their attention.
"Who the fuck is he?" Hilda screamed. A miliciano waved him away.
"He's Ghede," Lara said. "He's the god."
After a moment Hilda said, "Tell him to come. This Michael. Tell him come here and look at me and say he lost my property."
Roger looked at Lara and then said, "He won't. Would you?" He looked down at his watch. "Look, you have to leave. The Americans, their police, will be coming out here."
"You hope," Hilda said. "No, man. Send for him. I want him to tell me how it was."
Everyone looked at Lara.
"All right," Lara said. She took a roulette table chip out of her pocket and gave it to Roger. "He'll come for this."
"You see how it goes, Roger," Hilda said. "The more we talk, the more we get back from this dead airplane. Now I want to meet your diver."
Roger looked at the chip. "Hilda, we'd give you the pilot if we could. The plane too. Unfortunately that's not possible."
"Do the best you can," Hilda said.
At the window outside, Ghede danced for them.
19
MICHAEL MANAGED to get to bed before dawn. He was almost asleep when morning lit the slats of his room, a breeze stirred the netting around his bed. The birds of day were chattering, a rattle of bad pennies that gathered force in the space where the drums had been. When he listened closely enough he found the drums still there, faded into sounds of dawn but relentless. Out on the ocean, a great mass of cloud was approaching, armored and crenelated, triumphally white. Before its fortress front, if you looked with the right eyes, with Lara's eyes, it was possible to see the powers of the island withdraw into dark green groves, into their own reflection under the surface of Guinee below.