It had been quite sudden.
She had watched him swimming toward the shallow end of the pool.
She had reached down to get him a towel.
She had thought at the exact moment of reaching for the towel about the telephone number he had given her, and wondered who would answer if she called it.
And then she had looked up.
There had been no one else at the pool that late. The last players had left the tennis courts, and the night lights had been turned off. Even the pool bar was shuttered, but there was a telephone on the outside wall, and it was from this telephone, twenty minutes later, that Inez called the number Jack Lovett had given her. She had sat on the edge of the pool with Jack Lovett’s head in her lap until the Tamil doctor arrived. The Tamil doctor said that the twenty minutes she had spent giving Jack Lovett CPR had been beside the point. The Tamil doctor said that what happened had been instantaneous, circulatory, final. In the blood, he said, and simultaneously snapped his fingers and drew them across his throat, a short chop.
It was Mr. Soebadio who had brought the Tamil doctor to the pool.
It was Mr. Soebadio who worked Jack Lovett’s arms into his seersucker jacket and carried him to the service area where his car was parked.
It was Mr. Soebadio who advised Inez to tell anyone who approached the car that Mr. Lovett was drunk and it was Mr. Soebadio who went back upstairs for her passport and it was Mr. Soebadio who suggested that certain possible difficulties in getting Mr. Lovett out of Indonesia could be circumvented by obtaining a small aircraft, what he called a good aircraft for clearance, which he happened to know how to do. He happened to know that there was a good aircraft for clearance on its way from Denpasar to Halim. He happened to know that the pilot, a good friend, would be willing to take Mrs. Victor and Mr. Lovett wherever Mrs. Victor wanted to go.
Within the limits imposed by the aircraft’s range of course.
The aircraft being a seven-passenger Lear.
Halim to Manila, no problem.
Manila to Guam, no problem.
Honolulu, a definite problem, but with permission to refuel on certain atolls unavailable to commercial aircraft Mr. Soebadio believed that he could solve it.
Say Kwajalein.
Say Johnston.
Guam to Kwajalein, thirteen hundred miles approximately, well within range.
Kwajalein to Johnston, say eighteen hundred, adjust for drag since the prevailing winds were westward, still within range.
Johnston to Honolulu, seven hundred seventeen precisely and no problem whatsoever.
Mr. Soebadio had a pocket calculator and he stood on the tarmac at Halim working out the ratios for weight and lift and ground distance and wind velocity while Inez watched the Tamil doctor and the pilot lift Jack Lovett onto the back passenger seats in the Lear and get him into a body bag. Before he zipped the body bag closed the Tamil doctor went through the pockets of Jack Lovett’s seersucker jacket and handed the few cards he found to Mr. Soebadio. Mr. Soebadio glanced at the cards and dropped them into his own pocket, still intent on his calculator. Inez considered asking Mr. Soebadio for whatever had been in Jack Lovett’s pockets but decided against it. Somebody dies, you’d just as soon he didn’t have your card in his pocket, Jack Lovett had told her once. The zipper on the body bag caught on the lapel of the seersucker jacket and Mr. Soebadio helped the Tamil doctor work it loose. Another thing Inez decided not to ask Mr. Soebadio was where the body bag had come from.
The cotton dress she was wearing was soaked with pool water and cool against her skin.
She smelled the chlorine all night long.
At Manila she did not get out of the Lear.
At Guam she was half asleep but aware of the descent and the landing strobes and the American voices of the ground crew. The pilot checked into the operations room and brought back containers of coffee and a newspaper. WHERE AMERICA’S DAY BEGINS, the newspaper had worked into the eagle on its flag.
At Kwajalein she could see the missile emplacements from the air and was told on the ground that she did not have clearance to get out of the plane.
At Johnston she did get out, and walked by herself to the end of the long empty runway, where the asphalt met the lagoon. Jack Lovett had spent three weeks on Johnston. 1952. Waiting on the weather. Wonder Woman Two was the name of the shot. She remembered that. She even remembered him telling her he had been in Manila, and the souvenir he brought. A Filipino blouse. Starched white lace. The first summer she was married to Harry she had found it in a drawer and worn it at Rehoboth. The starched white lace against her bare skin had aroused both of them and later Harry had asked why she never wore the blouse again.
Souvenir of Manila.
Bought on Johnston from a reconnaissance pilot who had flown in from Clark.
She knew now.
She took off her sandals and waded into the lagoon and splashed the warm water on her face and soaked her bandana and then turned around and walked back to the Lear. While the pilot was talking to the mechanics about a minor circuit he believed to be malfunctioning Inez opened the body bag. She had intended to place the wet bandana in Jack Lovett’s hands but when she saw that rigor had set in she closed the body bag again. She left the bandana inside. Souvenir of Johnston. It occurred to her that Johnston would have been the right place to bury him but no one on Johnston had been told about the body on the Lear and the arrangement had already been made between Mr. Soebadio and the colonel at Schofield and so she went on, and did it at Schofield.
Which was fine.
Johnston would have been the right place but Schofield was fine.
Once she got the other site.
The site near the jacaranda.
The first site the colonel had suggested had been too near the hedge. The hedge that concealed the graves of the executed soldiers. There were seven of them. To indicate that they died in disgrace they were buried facing away from the flag, behind the hedge. She happened to know about the hedge because Jack Lovett had shown it to her, not long after they met. In fact they had argued about it. She had thought it cruel and unusual to brand the dead. Forever and ever. He had thought that it was not cruel and unusual at all, that it was merely pointless. That it was sentimental to think it mattered which side of the hedge they buried you on.
She remembered exactly what he had said.
The sun still rises and you still don’t see it, he had said.
Nevertheless.
All things being equal she did not want him buried anywhere near the hedge and the colonel had seen her point right away.
So it had worked out.
It had all been fine.
She had taken a commercial flight to Singapore that night and changed directly for Kuala Lumpur.
She had called no one.
We were sitting after dinner on the porch of the bungalow Inez was renting in Kuala Lumpur when she told me this. It was my first day there. All afternoon at the clinic she had talked about Harry Victor and the Alliance for Democratic Institutions, and when I asked at dinner where Jack Lovett was she had said only that he was not in Kuala Lumpur. After dinner we had sat on the porch without speaking for a while and then she had begun, abruptly.
“Something happened in August,” she had said.
Somewhere between Guam and Kwajalein she had asked if I wanted tea, and had brought it out to the porch in a chipped teapot painted with a cartoon that suggested the bungalow’s period: a cigar-smoking bulldog flanked by two rosebuds, one labeled “Lillibet” and the other “Margaret Rose.” Inez was barefoot. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing no makeup. There had been during the course of her account a sudden hard fall of rain, temporarily walling the porch with glassy sheets of water, and now after the rain termites swarmed around the light and dropped in our teacups, but Inez made no more note of the termites than she had of the rain or for that matter of the teapot. After she stopped talking we sat in silence a moment and then Inez poured me another cup of tea and flicked the termites from its surface with her fingernail. “What do you think about this,” she said.