"I'm afraid for my friend," Michael said. "Lara Purcell. I left her behind. I'm afraid they may hurt her."
"I know your story, Mr. Ahearn. I know you're a thoughtful man, friend of herself. Well, you don't have to worry. Because everything is under control, including the lodge. And she will be safe, I can promise you. So you don't have to worry. Understand?"
Michael said nothing.
"How'd you like to live in someone else's paradise?" the colonel asked.
"I can't imagine it."
"Think of it as a misfortune. A huge fucking pink misfortune."
"I guess I don't understand," Michael said. "I haven't been here long."
"Yah, man. But I think you understand, eh? I would be surprised if you don't have a piece of the picture."
The road headed down toward a concentration of light at what appeared to be the end of the island. The mass of land gave way to an expanse of rolling moonlit ocean; just short of the waves were fields outlined in geometric patterns of red and white light.
"We don't have a choice, do we?" the colonel said. "We've inherited bloody paradise and now we've got to live by selling it. Paradise and every naughty little thing." He leaned back in the seat and slapped Michael on the knee.
"Oh yes, we have all those naughty things they want and don't need. The drugs, the coffee, the chocolate, the rum and the orange-flavored booze, the tobacco, the girls and the boys. Shouldn't have them. Bad for you. Live longer without them but they're oh so nice, yes, indeed. How you want them all. And that's our fortune."
The car passed a checkpoint at the approach to the All Saints Bay international airport. There were soldiers everywhere in the uniform of the island's new army. The soldiers took a look inside the Mercedes and waved them through.
"Hands across the sea, right!" Colonel Junot declared. "You get to Washington, say hello to my friends. Tell them I want my medal from the President! Soldier in the war on drugs!"
The car stopped and the driver came around to let Michael out. He stepped out of the air conditioning and into the warm ocean breeze.
"Soldier in the war on ganja. Soldier in the war on cocaine. That's right! Soldier in the war on sugar and sweeties. And the war on rum. The war on cee-gars. The war on fancy jewelry. The war on screwing and gambling and general do-badness. You tell the President that the armies of Paradise salute his tall fine figure and the war on everything is going great. Tell him I knew his daddy and I want my medal."
Michael had only the shoulder bag he had taken from his hotel room. He moved among the watchful soldiers toward the wooden terminal. Beside it, a DC-7 stood with its engines running, attended by half a platoon of American Special Forces soldiery in green berets. He went into the harsh fluorescent light of the terminal building. The young Cuban American woman at the commuter airline's desk checked his ticket. There was a mirror in the wall behind her desk and he could see that he did not resemble Ghede. But the Baron was waiting for him at the Emigration window, where a customs official was flanked by supportive soldiers. The Emigration man was Baron Samedi.
"You got to have your pink form," Baron Samedi said. "Otherwise you can't fly."
Michael checked his pockets twice. He checked them again. He searched his shoulder bag several times. He could not find his pink form.
"For God's sake," he told Baron Samedi.
"They got no special rules for you, mon," the Baron said. "Either you give me your pink form or get out of line. There are people behind you."
Michael turned and saw that there were indeed people waiting to pass Emigration.
"I flew into Rodney. I don't think they ever gave me the thing," Michael said. "I've got to get on that plane." In fact it was absolutely the only thing on his mind and he was ready to kill, or to die, in the process of boarding it.
He was at the point of losing control when he saw Colonel Junot enter the terminal. The colonel saw him and came to the window.
"Pass this man," the colonel said. "This is my messenger."
Baron Samedi had departed from the customs officer, who mildly stepped aside. It had been a farewell message, a little game typical of Ghede.
Colonel Junot had come into the unadorned departure lounge with Michael. Shaking hands, he quickly turned aside.
"Uh-oh," he told Michael. "I see someone I don't wish to meet." He hurried out through the customs gate where he had come in.
Making his way to the last bench in the departure area, Michael saw Liz McKie standing beside the ladies' room. She looked extremely angry. Two island soldiers were with her. The soldiers by contrast looked happy and well entertained.
McKie saw Michael and called to him.
"Jesus Christ! What are you doing here?" she demanded.
"I guess I'm leaving."
"You guess you're leaving?" She stared at him for a moment and then said, "Watch this stuff." She was surrounded by computers, cameras and recorders, all packed away in cloth, Velcro-banded cases. "I have to go to the john and I'm not leaving my stuff with these bozos."
"We're insulted," one of the soldiers said, laughing at her. "We don't steal."
"That's right," the other one said. "We never steal from a friend of Colonel Junot."
"Where is Colonel Junot?" the first soldier asked. "Not coming to see you go?"
"Fuck you," McKie told the soldiers. "Watch that stuff like it cast a spell on you," she told Michael. "Don't let these characters near it."
"We have to come in the lavatory with you, miss," the first soldier said. "Orders!"
Before she could react, they were doubled up with laughter, dapping.
"I mean," Liz said to Michael, "keep an eye on it."
While Liz McKie was inside, the soldiers tried to decide whether to pretend to steal some of the equipment, drawing Michael into their game. In the end — probably, he thought, because he looked so disheveled and unhinged — they let it pass.
When she returned to her possessions, Michael wandered out to the veranda of the departure lounge, which was the only place to get fresh air. It was a restricted area but the sentry there let him out. He took in the wind of the island and of the ocean, the jasmine and burning husks, a touch of the rubber stench. From ever so far away — although it could only have been a few miles — he heard the drums. He tried to understand whether it was his life he heard beating there, and if it was his life, his heart, where it might be inclining. But the drumming was only itself, only the moment. In the flickering lights beyond the airport fence, he thought he saw the wheelbarrow, the tongue of the goat.
They boarded the plane and Michael saw that one of the Special Forces soldiers was a woman, bespectacled, pretty, with man-sized shoulders.
When Liz McKie tried to address the woman soldier, the soldier stared straight ahead and addressed her as "ma'am."
"Ma'am yourself, troop," Liz McKie said to her.
To further McKie's humiliation, she was seated just behind and across the aisle from Michael on the flight to Puerto Rico. The impulse to explain it all was too much for her and she had not added up the emotional tokens yet.
"I cannot believe this," she told him. "I mean, it's all so typical I can't believe it."
She had been persona non-ed out.
"I mean, not with paper, not to the State Department, but my ass is flung out. I mean, my friend — my friend, my lover." People stopped their own conversations to hear her.
"I mean, this is your U.S. Third World hype — screwing of the classic type, right. So there's corruption. And some right-wing official Americans are in on it, right, and their Argentine, Chilean colonel friends, the worst cabrones, but hey, that's cool. It's cool because they're rogue elements, they're not really us. Us are the good guys, us are the girl Green Berets, and we fix everything and we throw the bad guys out. Except we don't quite get the bad guys out and the good guys turn out to be not very different from the bad guys and, hey, it's all looking kind of the same as it was. And when you look, the rogue elements are gone, vanished, except not quite. And some idiot reporter buys into the good guys' scenario and what happens to her? I mean, I knew it! You know when I knew it? When I saw you! I thought, Who the fuck? And I knew things were screwed."