Ann Patchett (4 page)

Over the next two days, everything Gen touched
became a smooth surface. He typed up Mr. Hosokawa’s handwritten notes, took
care of scheduling, found tickets to a performance of
Orfeo
ed Euridice
that had been sold out for six weeks. At the conference he
spoke in Greek for Mr. Hosokawa and his
associates, spoke in
Japanese to them, and was
, in all matters, intelligent, quick, and
professional. But it was not his presence that Mr. Hosokawa was drawn
to,
it was his lack of presence. Gen was an extension, an
invisible self that was constantly anticipating his needs. He felt Gen would
remember whatever had been forgotten. One afternoon during a private meeting
concerning shipping interests, as Gen translated into Greek what he had just
that moment said himself, Mr. Hosokawa finally recognized the voice. Something
so familiar, that’s what he had
thought
. It was
his own
voice.

“I don’t do a great deal of business in
Greece
,” Mr.
Hosokawa said to Gen that night over drinks in the bar of the Athens Hilton. The
bar was on top of the hotel and looked out over the Acropolis, and yet it
seemed that the Acropolis, small and chalky in the distance, had been built
there for just this reason, to provide a pleasant visual diversion for the
drinking guests. “I was wondering about your other languages.” Mr. Hosokawa had
heard him speaking English on the phone.

Gen made a list, stopping from time to time to
see what had been left out. He divided into categories the languages in which
he felt he was extremely fluent, very fluent, fluent, passable, and could read.
He knew more languages than there were specialty cocktails listed in the
Plexiglas holder on the table. They each ordered a drink called an Areopagus.
They toasted.

His Spanish was extremely fluent.

Half a world away, in a country twice as
foreign, Mr. Hosokawa was remembering the Athens airport, all the men with
mustaches and Uzis who called to mind the man who held the gun now. That was
the day he met Gen, four years ago, five? After that, Gen came back to
Tokyo
to work for him
full-time. When there was nothing that needed translating, Gen simply seemed to
take care of things before anyone knew they needed taking care of. Gen was so
central to the way he thought now that Mr. Hosokawa forgot sometimes he didn’t
know the languages himself, that the voice people listened to was not his
voice. He had not understood what the man with the gun was saying and yet it
was perfectly clear to him. At worst, they were dead. At best, they were
looking at the beginning of a long ordeal. Mr. Hosokawa had gone someplace he
never should have gone, let strangers believe something that was not true, all
to hear a woman sing. He looked across the room at Roxane Coss. He could barely
see her, her accompanist had
her
so neatly wedged
between himself and the piano.

“President Masuda,” the man with the mustache
and the gun said.

There was an uneasy shifting among the
well-dressed guests, no one wanting to be the one to break the news.

“President Masuda, come forward.”

People kept their eyes blank, waiting, until
the man with the gun brought the gun down so that now it faced the crowd, though
in particular it appeared to be pointed at a blonde woman in her fifties named
Elise, who was a Swiss banker. She blinked a few times and then crossed her
wide-open hands one on top of the other to cover her heart, as if this was the
place she was most likely to be shot. She would offer up her hands if they
might afford her heart a millisecond of protection. While this elicited a few
gasps from the audience, it did little else. There was an embarrassing wait
that ruled out all notions of heroics or even chivalry, and then finally the
Vice President of the host country took a small step forward and introduced
himself.

“I am Vice President Ruben Iglesias,” he said
to the man with the gun. The Vice President appeared to be extremely tired. He
was a very small man, both in stature and girth, who had been chosen as a
running mate as much for his size as for his political beliefs. The pervasive
thinking in government was that a taller vice president would make the
President appear weak, replaceable. “President Masuda was unable to attend this
evening. He is not here.” The Vice President’s voice was heavy. Too much of
this burden was falling to him.

“Lies,” the man with the gun corrected.

Ruben Iglesias shook his head sadly. No one
wished more than he that President Masuda were in attendance right now, instead
of lying in his own bed, happily playing over the plot of tonight’s soap opera
in his mind. General Alfredo quickly turned the gun in his hand so that he now
held the muzzle rather than the handle. He brought the gun back in the air and
hit the Vice President on the flat bone of his cheek beside the right eye. There
was a soft thump, a sound considerably less violent than the action, as the
handle of the gun hit the skin over the bone and the small man was knocked to
the ground. His blood wasted no time in making its exit, spilling out the
three-centimeter gash near his hairline. Some of it made its way into his ear
and started the journey back into his head. Still, everyone, including the Vice
President (now lying half conscious on his own living-room rug where not ten
hours before he had rolled in a mock wrestling match with his three-year-old
son) was pleased and surprised that he had not been shot dead.

The man with the gun looked at the Vice
President on the floor and then, as if liking the sight of him there,
instructed the rest of the party to lie down. For those who didn’t speak the
language this was clear enough, as one by one the other guests sank to their
knees and then stretched out on the floor.

“Faceup,” he added.

The few who had done it wrong rolled over now. Two
of the Germans and a man from
Argentina
would not lie down at all until the soldiers went and poked them sharply in the
backs of their knees with rifles. The guests took up considerably more room
lying down than they had standing up, and to accommodate the need for space
some lay down in the foyer and others in the dining room. One hundred and
ninety-one guests lay down, twenty waiters lay down, seven prep cooks and chefs
lay down. The Vice President’s three children and their governess were brought
from the upstairs bedroom, where, despite the late hour, they had yet to go to
sleep because they had been watching Roxane Coss sing from the top of the
stairs, and they, too, lay down. Scattered across the floor like area rugs lay
some important men and women and a few extremely important men and women,
ambassadors and various diplomats, cabinet members, bank presidents,
corporation heads, a monseigneur, and one opera star, who appeared to be much
smaller now that she was on the floor. Bit by bit the accompanist was moving on
top of her, trying to bury her beneath his own broad back. She squirmed a bit.
The women who believed that this would all be over shortly and they would be
home in their own beds by two
A.M.
were careful to adjust their full
skirts beneath them in a way that would minimize wrinkling. The ones who
believed they would be shot presently let the silk wad and crease. When
everyone had settled to the floor the room was left remarkably quiet.

Now the people were clearly divided into two
groups: those who were standing and those who were lying down. Instructions
were given, those lying down were to remain quiet and still, those standing up
should check those lying down for weapons and for secretly being the president.

One would think that being on the floor would
make one feel more vulnerable, more afraid. They could be stepped on or kicked.
They could be shot without even the chance to run. Yet to a person everyone on
the floor felt better. They could no longer plot to overpower a terrorist or
consider a desperate run at the door. They were considerably less likely to be
accused of doing something they did not do. They were like small dogs trying to
avoid a fight, their necks and bellies turned willfully towards sharp teeth,
take me
. Even the Russians, who had been whispering a plot
to make a run for it a few minutes before, experienced the relief of
resignation. Not a few of the guests closed their eyes. It was late. There had
been wine and turbot and a very nice small chop, and as much as they were
terrified, they were tired. The boots that stepped around them, over them, were
old and caked in mud that flaked off into trails across the elaborately
patterned Savonnière carpet (which, mercifully, lay on a good pad). There were
holes in the boots and the edges of toes could be seen, toes being now so close
to eyes. Some of the boots had fallen apart and were held together by silver
electrical tape that was itself filthy and rolled back at the edges. The young
people crouched down over the guests. They did not smile but there was nothing
particularly threatening in their faces either. It was easy to imagine how this
might have gone if everyone had been standing, a smaller boy with several knives
needing to establish his authority over a taller, older man wearing an
expensive tuxedo. But now the boys’ hands moved quickly, fluttering in and out
of pockets, smoothing down pants legs with their fingers spread. For the women
there was just the slightest tapping around the skirts. Sometimes a boy would
lean over, hesitate, and pull away altogether. They found very little of
interest, as this was a dinner party.

The following items were recorded in a notebook
by the very quiet General Hector: six silver pen knives in trouser pockets and
four cigar cutters on watch chains, one pearl-handled pistol scarcely larger
than a comb in an evening bag. At first they thought it was a cigarette lighter
and accidentally popped off a round trying to find the flame, leaving a narrow
gouge in the dining-room table. A letter opener with a cloisonné handle from
the desk and all manner of knives and meat forks from the kitchen, the poker
and the shovel from the stand by the fireplace, and a snub-nosed .38 Smith
& Wesson revolver from the Vice President’s bedside table, a gun which the
Vice President freely admitted to having when questioned. All of this they
locked into an upstairs linen closet. They left the watches, wallets, and
jewelry. One boy took a peppermint from a woman’s satin evening clutch but
first held it up discreetly for consent. She moved her head down and back, just
a quarter of an inch, and he smiled and slipped off the cellophane.

One boy peered intently at Gen and Mr.
Hosokawa, looking once and then again at their faces. He stared at Mr. Hosokawa
and then backed up, stepping on the hand of one of the waiters, who winced and
pulled it quickly away. “General,” the boy said, too loudly for such a quiet
room. Gen moved closer to his employer, as if to say by the position of his
body that this was a package deal, they went together.

Over the warm and breathing guests stepped
General Benjamin. At first glance one might have thought he had the unlucky
draw of a large port wine birthmark, but with another look it was clear that
what was on his face was a living, raging thing. The bright red river of
shingles began somewhere deep beneath his black hair and cut a swath across his
left temple, stopping just short of his eye. The very sight of them made the
viewer weak from sympathetic pain. General Benjamin followed the path of the
boy’s pointing finger and he, too, stared at Mr. Hosokawa for a long time. “No,”
he said to the boy. He began to turn away, but then he stopped, said to Mr.
Hosokawa in a conversational manner, “He thought you were the President.”

“He thought you were the President,” Gen said
quietly, and Mr. Hosokawa nodded. A Japanese man in his fifties wearing
glasses, there were another half-dozen lying around.

General Benjamin dropped his rifle down to
Gen’s chest and rested the muzzle there like a walking stick. The round opening
was barely bigger than one of the studs on his shirtfront and it made a small
and distinct point of pressure. “No talking.”

Gen mouthed the word
traductor
to him. The General considered this for a moment, as if he had just been told
the man he had spoken to was deaf or blind. Then he picked up his gun and
walked away. Surely, Gen thought, there must be some medication that man could
take that would help him. When he inhaled he felt a small, piercing ache where
the point of the gun had been.

Not so far away, near the piano, two boys took
their guns and poked at the accompanist until he was more beside Roxane Coss
than on top of her. Her hair, which had been pulled up into an elaborate twist
on the back of her head, was nearly impossible to lie on. She had
surreptitiously removed the pins and put them in a neat pile on her stomach,
where they could be collected as weapons if anyone was so inclined to take
them. Now her hair, long and curled, spread out around her head and every young
terrorist made a point of coming by to see it, some being bold enough to touch
it, not the deep satisfaction of a stroke, but the smallest of taps with one
finger near its curling ends. Leaning over this way, they could smell her
perfume, which was different from the perfumes of the other women they had
inspected. The opera singer had somehow replicated the scent of the tiny white
flowers they had passed in the garden on their way to the air ducts. Even on
this night, with the possibilities of their own deaths and the possibilities of
liberation weighing heavily on their minds, they had noticed the smell of such
a tiny, bell-shaped flower that grew near the high stucco wall, and now to find
it here again so soon in the hair of the beautiful woman, it felt like an omen,
like good luck. They had heard her sing while they waited crouched inside the
air-conditioning vents. They each had a task, extremely specific instructions.
The lights were to be cut off after the sixth song, no one ever having
explained in their lives the concept of an encore. No one having explained
opera, or what it was to sing other than the singing that was done in a
careless way, under one’s
breath
, while carrying wood
into the house or water up from the well. No
one having
explained anything. Even the generals, who had been to the capital city before,
who had had educations, held their breath so as to better hear her. The young
terrorists waiting in the air-conditioning vents were simple people and they
believed simple things. When a girl in their village had a pretty voice, one of
the old women would say she had swallowed a bird, and this was what they tried
to say to themselves as they looked at the pile of hairpins resting on the
pistachio chiffon of her gown:
she has swallowed a bird
.
But they knew it wasn’t true. In all their ignorance, in all their
unworldliness, they knew there had never been such a bird.