Ann Patchett (3 page)

“Matters in
Israel
,” they were told
confidentially.

“
Israel
,” they whispered. They were
impressed, never dreaming that President Masuda would be consulted on matters
in
Israel
.

There was a clear division among the almost two
hundred guests that night: those who knew where the President was and those who
didn’t, and so it remained until both sides forgot about him altogether. Mr.
Hosokawa barely noticed the absence. He cared very little about meeting the
President. What could a president possibly mean on the evening one would meet
Roxane Coss?

Into the presidential void, the Vice President,
Ruben Iglesias, stepped forward to host the party. This was not so difficult to
imagine. The dinner was being given in his home. Throughout the cocktails and
hors d’oeuvres, the sit-down dinner and the creamy singing, his mind stayed on
the President. How easy it was to picture his running mate now as Iglesias had
seen him a hundred times before, sitting in the dark on the edge of the bed in
the master suite of the presidential palace, his suit jacket folded over the
arm of a chair, his hands folded and pressed between his knees. He would be
watching a small television that sat on his dresser while his wife watched the
same program on a large screen in the den downstairs. A picture of a beautiful
girl tied to a chair reflected in his glasses. She twisted her wrists back and
forth, over and over again, until suddenly she found some slack in the rope and
slid one hand free. Maria was free! President Masuda rocked back and clapped
his hands silently. To think he had almost missed this, after waiting for
weeks! The girl glanced quickly around the storeroom and then leaned forward to
untie the coarse rope that bound her ankles.

Then in an instant the picture of Maria was
gone and Ruben Iglesias lifted his face to the lights which were suddenly
restored to his living room. He had just begun to register that a bulb was
burned out on a side table lamp when men burst into the party from every window
and wall. Everywhere the Vice President turned the edges of the room seemed to
push forward, yelling. Heavy boots and gun butts pounded through vents, stormed
in through doors. People were thrown together and then just as quickly broke
apart in a state of animal panic. The house seemed to rise up like a boat
caught inside the wide arm of a wave and flip onto its side. Silverware flew
into the air, the tines of forks twisting against knife blades, vases smashed
into walls. People slipped, fell, ran, but only for an instant, only until
their eyes readjusted to the light and they saw the utter uselessness of their
fight.

It was easy to see who
was in
charge—the older men
, the ones shouting orders. They did not introduce
themselves at the time and so, for a while, they were thought of not by their
names but by their most distinctive features. Benjamin: raging shingles.
Alfredo: mustache, first and second fingers missing on left hand. Hector: gold
wire glasses that had lost one arm. With the Generals came fifteen soldiers who
ranged in age from twenty to fourteen. There were now an additional eighteen
people at the party. No one there could count them at the time. They moved and
spread. They doubled and tripled as they pulsed around the room, appeared from
behind curtains, came down from upstairs, disappeared into the kitchen. They
were impossible to count because they seemed to be everywhere, because they
were so similar, like trying to count bees in a swarm around your head. They
wore faded clothing in dark colors, many in the dull green of shallow, sludgy
ponds, a handful in denim or black. Over their clothing they wore a second
layer of weapons, sashes of bullets, flashy knives in back pockets, all manner
of guns, smaller guns holstered to thighs or sticking up hopefully from belts,
larger guns cradled like infants, brandished like sticks. They wore caps with
the bills pulled down, but no one was interested in their eyes, only their
guns, only their shark-toothed knives. A man with three guns was recorded
subconsciously as three men. There were other similarities between the men:
they were thin, either from the wanting of food or just the business of
growing, their shoulders and knees poked at their clothing. They were also
dirty, noticeably so. Even in the confusion of the moment everyone could see
that they were smudged and streaked, arms and faces and hands mottled in dirt
as if they had arrived at the party by digging up through the gardens and
dislodging a panel in the floor.

This entrance could not have taken more than a
minute, and yet it seemed to last longer than all four courses of dinner. There
was time for every guest to consider a strategy, revise it thoroughly, and
abandon it. Husbands found wives who had drifted to the other side of the
room,
countrymen sought out their own and stood in blocks,
speaking rapidly to one another. It was the consensus of the party that they
had been kidnapped not by
La
Familia
de Martin Suarez (so named for a boy of ten who had
been shot dead by the government’s army while passing out flyers for a
political rally) but by the much more famous terrorists,
La Dirección Auténtica
,
a revolutionary group of murderers whose reputation had been built over five
years of wide-ranging brutality. It was the unspoken belief of everyone who was
familiar with this organization and with the host country that they were all as
good as dead, when in fact it was the terrorists who would not survive the
ordeal. Then the terrorist missing two fingers who
was
wearing wrinkled green pants and a mismatched jacket raised the large
.45-caliber auto and fired two rounds into the ceiling. A splattering of
plaster dislodged and dusted a portion of the guests, at which point several of
the women screamed, either from the firing of the gun or the touch of something
unexpected on their bare shoulders.

“Attention,” the man with the gun said in
Spanish. “This is an arrest. We demand absolute cooperation and attention.”

Roughly two-thirds of the guests looked
frightened, but a scattered third looked both frightened and puzzled. These
were the ones leaning towards the man with the gun, instead of away from him. These
were the ones that did not speak Spanish. They whispered quickly to their
neighbors. The word
atención
was repeated in several
languages. That word was clear enough.

General Alfredo had anticipated his
announcement bringing about a sort of pricked, waiting silence, but no silence
came. The whispering caused him to fire into the ceiling again, carelessly this
time, hitting a light fixture, which exploded. The room was dimmer, and slivers
of glass settled into shirt collars and rested on hair.
“Arresto,”
he repeated.
“Detengase!”

It may seem surprising at first, such a large
number of people unable to speak the language of the host country, but then you
remember it was a gathering to promote foreign interest and the two guests of
honor did not know ten words of Spanish between them, although
arresto
made logical sense to Roxane Coss and meant
nothing to Mr. Hosokawa. They leaned forward as if it might make understanding
easier. Miss Coss was not leaning far, as the accompanist had wrapped himself
around her like a security wall, his body ready, anxious, to step in front of
any bullet that might stray in her direction.

Gen Watanabe, the young man who worked as Mr.
Hosokawa’s translator, leaned over and spoke the words in Japanese to his
employer.

Not that it would have done him any good in
these present circumstances, but Mr. Hosokawa had once tried to learn Italian
from a set of tapes he listened to on airplanes. For business purposes he
should have learned English, but he was more interested in improving his
understanding of opera.
“Il bigliettaio mi fece
il
biglietto,”
the tape said.
“Il
bigliettaio mi fece
il
biglietto,”
he mouthed
back silently, not wanting to disturb the other passengers. But his efforts
were minimal at best and in the end he made no progress. The sound of the
language spoken made him long for the sound of the language sung and soon he
was slipping
Madama Butterfly
into the CD player
instead.

When he was younger, Mr. Hosokawa saw the great
advantage of languages. When he was older he wished he had made the commitment
to learn them. The translators! They were ever-changing, some good, some full of
schoolboy stiffness, some utterly, hopelessly stupid. Some could hardly speak
their native Japanese and continually halted conversations to look up a word in
a dictionary. There were those who could perform their job well enough, but
were not the sort of people one wished to travel with. Some would abandon him
the moment the final sentence of a meeting was
completed,
leaving him stranded and mute if further negotiations were necessary. Others
were dependent, wanting to stay with him through every meal, wanting to
accompany him on his walks and recount for him every moment of their own
lusterless childhoods. What he went through just for a mouthful of French, a
few clear sentences of English. What he went through before Gen.

Gen Watanabe had been assigned to him at a
conference on the worldwide distribution of goods in
Greece
. Normally, Mr. Hosokawa
tried to avoid the surprise element local translators so often provided, but
his secretary had been unable to locate a Greek translator who could travel on
short notice. During the plane ride to
Athens
,
Mr. Hosokawa did not talk with the two senior vice presidents and three sales
managers who accompanied him on the trip. Instead, he listened to Maria Callas
sing a collection of Greek songs on his Nansei headset, thinking
philosophically if the meeting was unintelligible to him, at least he would
have seen the country she considered her home. After waiting in line to have
his passport stamped and his luggage rifled through, Mr. Hosokawa saw a young
man holding a sign,
Hosokawa,
neatly lettered. The
young man was Japanese, which, frankly, was a relief. It was easier to deal
with a countryman who knew a little Greek than a Greek who knew a little
Japanese. This translator was tall for being Japanese. His hair was heavy and
long in the front and it brushed across the top rims of his small round glasses
even as he tried to keep it parted to one side. He appeared to be quite young.
It was the hair. The hair denoted to Mr. Hosokawa a lack of seriousness, or
perhaps it was just the fact that the young man was in
Athens
rather than
Tokyo
that made him seem less serious. Mr. Hosokawa approached him, gave the
slightest bow of acknowledgment that only included his neck and upper
shoulders, a gesture that said,
You
have found me.

The young man reached forward and took Mr.
Hosokawa’s briefcase, bowing as he did so to the waist. He bowed seriously,
though somewhat less deeply, to both of the vice presidents and the three sales
managers. He introduced himself as the translator, inquired after the comfort
of the flight, gave the estimated driving time to the hotel and the starting
time of the first meeting. In the crowded
Athens
airport, where every second man seemed to sport a mustache and an Uzi, among
the jostling of bags and the din of shouting and overhead announcements, Mr.
Hosokawa heard something in this young man’s voice, something familiar and
soothing. It was not a musical voice, and yet it affected him like music. Speak
again.

“Where are you from?” Mr. Hosokawa asked.

“
Nagano
city, sir.”

“Very beautiful, and the Olympics—”

Gen nodded, contributing no information about
the Olympics.

Mr. Hosokawa struggled to come up with
something else. It had been a long flight and it seemed that in the time he had
been on the plane he had forgotten how to make conversation. He felt it should
be incumbent upon Gen to attempt to draw him out. “And your family, are they
still there?”

Gen Watanabe paused for a moment as if he were
remembering. A swarm of Australian teenagers passed them, each with a knapsack
strapped to her back. Their shouts and laughter filled the concourse. “Wombat!”
one girl cried out, and the others answered, “Wombat! Wombat!
Wombat!”
They stumbled in their laughter and clung to each
other’s arms. “They are all there,” Gen said, eyeing the backs of the teenagers
with cautious suspicion.
“My father, mother, and two
sisters.”

“And your
sisters,
are
they married?” Mr. Hosokawa did not care about the sisters, but the voice was
something he could almost place, like the notes opening the first act of, what?

Gen looked at him directly.
“Married,
sir.”

Suddenly this dull question took on the edge of
something inappropriate. Mr. Hosokawa looked away while Gen took his luggage
and led his party through the sliding glass doors into the blasting heat of
Greece
at noon.
The limousine waited, cool and
idling,
and the men
climbed inside.