Ann Patchett (5 page)

In the steady river of approaching boys, one crouched
down beside her and picked up her hand. He held it lightly, hardly more than
rested her palm against his own, so that she could have taken it back from him
at any minute, but she did not. Roxane Coss knew the longer he held her hand,
the more he would love her, and if he loved her he was more likely to try and
protect her from the others, from himself. This particular boy looked
impossibly young and fine-boned beneath the bill of his cap, his eyelids
burdened by the weight of a thousand silky black lashes. Across his narrow
chest was a bandolier of bullets and his body curved beneath their weight. The
rough wooden handle of a primitive kitchen knife stuck up from the top of one
boot and a pistol was half falling from his pocket. Roxane Coss thought of
Chicago
and the frigid
nights of late October. If this boy had been living in another country, in an
entirely different life, he might still have gone out trick-or-treating next
week, even if he had been too old. He might have dressed as a terrorist, worn
old boots from
a gardening
shed, fashioned a bandolier
from strips of corrugated cardboard, and filled each loop with a tube of his
mother’s lipstick. The boy would not look at her, only her hand. He studied it
as if it were something completely separate from her. Under any other
circumstances she would have pulled it away from him, but due to the remarkable
course of the evening’s events, she kept her hand still and allowed it to be
studied.

The accompanist raised his head and glowered at
the boy, who then settled Roxane Coss’s hand back against her dress and walked
away.

*  *  *

Two facts: none of the guests was armed; none
of the guests was President Masuda. Groups of boys with guns drawn were
dispatched to different corners of the house, down to the basement, up to the
attic, out around the edges of the high stucco wall, to see if he had hidden
himself in the confusion. But the word came back again and again that no one
was there. Through the open windows came the raucous sawing of insect life. In
the living room of the vice-presidential home, everything was still. General
Benjamin sat down on his heels next to the Vice President, who was bleeding
heartily into the dinner napkin which his wife, who lay beside him, pressed
against his head. A more sinister edge of purple was now ringing his eye. It
looked nowhere near as painful as the inflammation of
his own
face. “Where is President Masuda?” the General asked
,
as if it was the first moment they had noticed him gone.

“At home.”
He took the bloody cloth from his
wife and motioned for her to scoot away.

“Why did he not come this evening?”

What the General was asking was, did he have a
mole in his organization,
did
the President receive
word of an attack? But the Vice President was dazed from the blow and feeling
bitter besides, bitterness being a first cousin to the truth. “He wanted to
watch his soap opera,” Ruben Iglesias said, and in the hushed and obedient room
his voice traveled to every ear. “He wanted to see if Maria would be freed
tonight.”

“Why were we told he would be here?”

The Vice President gave it up without
hesitation or remorse. “He had agreed to attend and then he changed his mind.” There
was an uneasy shifting of bodies on the floor. The people who didn’t know were
as appalled to hear it as the ones who had known all along. Ruben Iglesias had
at that exact moment ended his own political career. There had been no great
love between him and Masuda to begin with, and now Masuda would ruin him. A
vice president worked hard because he believed someday the office would be
handed down, like property passed from father to son. In the meantime he bit
his lip, took the dirty jobs, the ceremonial funerals, visits to earthquake
sites. He nodded appreciatively through each of the President’s interminable speeches.
But on this night he no longer believed he would someday be the President. Tonight
he believed he would be shot along with some of his guests, possibly all of his
guests, possibly his children, and if that was the case, he wanted the world to
know that Eduardo Masuda, a man barely one centimeter taller than himself, was
home watching television.

The Catholic priests, sons of those murdering
Spanish missionaries, loved to tell the people that the truth would set them
free, and in this case they were exactly correct. The General named Benjamin
had cocked his gun and was prepared to make an example by dispatching the Vice
President into the next world, but the soap opera story stopped him. As much as
he was sick to know that five months of planning for this one evening to kidnap
the President and possibly overthrow the entire government were worthless and
he was now saddled with two hundred and twenty-two hostages lying before him on
the floor, he believed the Vice President’s story completely. No one could make
it up. It was too petty and small-minded. General Benjamin had no qualms about
killing, believing from his own experience that life was nothing more than
excruciating suffering. If the Vice President had said the President had the
flu, he would have shot him. If he had said the President was called away on
urgent matters of national security, he would have shot him. If he had said it
was all a ruse and the President had never planned on attending the party at all,
bang.
But Maria, even in the jungle where
televisions were rare, electricity sketchy, and reception nonexistent, people
spoke of this Maria. Even Benjamin, who cared for nothing but the freedom of
the oppressed, knew something of Maria. Her program came on in the afternoons
from Monday to Friday, with a special episode on Tuesday nights which more or
less summarized the week for those who had to work during the day. If Maria was
to be freed, it was not surprising that it should happen on a Tuesday night.

There was a plan, and that plan had been to
take the President and be gone inside of seven minutes. They should be out of
the city by now, speeding their way over the dangerous roads that led back to
the jungle.

Through the windows, bright red strobe lights
flashed across the walls accompanied by a high-pitched wailing. The sound was
nagging and accusatory. It was nothing, nothing like song.

two

a
ll
night long the outside world
bellowed. Cars skidded and sped. Sirens arrived, departed, flicked off and on and
off again. Wooden barricades were dragged into place, people were herded
behind. It was surprising how much more they could hear now that they were
lying down. They had the time to concentrate—yes, there went the shuffling of
feet, that
was the sound of a baton being smacked into an
open palm. The ceiling had been memorized (light blue with crown molding that
was elaborate to the point of being tasteless, scrolling and spiraling and
every inch of it leafed in gold, the three chipped holes left by bullets) and
so guests closed their eyes to settle into the serious business of listening.
Voices,
exaggerated and mangled through the bullhorn’s
amplification, shouted instructions towards the street, made demands towards
the house. They would settle for nothing short of unqualified, immediate
surrender.

“You will put your guns down outside the door,”
the voice raged, loud and distorted as if it had bubbled up from the ocean
floor. “You will open the door and exit before the hostages, hands on the backs
of your heads. Next, the hostages will proceed through the front door. For the
purposes of safety, hostages should keep their hands on the top of their
heads.”

When one voice had completed its pitch the
bullhorn was handed off to another, who began it all over again with subtle
variations of the threats. There were a series of loud clicks and then an
artificial blue-white light spilled through the living-room window like cold
milk and made everyone squint. At what point had their problems been
discovered? Who had called these people in and how was it possible that so many
of them had assembled so quickly? Did they wait together in the basement of
some police
station,
wait for a night just like this? Did
they practice the things they would say, shouting through bullhorns to no one,
making the pitch of their voices go higher and higher. Even the guests knew
that no one would put down his guns and walk out the door simply because he was
told to do so. Even they understood that every time the demand was issued the
chances of it being answered favorably receded. Each of the guests dreamed that
he or she was in possession of a secret gun, and if they had such a gun they
would certainly never throw it down the front porch steps. After a while they
were so tired they forgot to wish that this had never happened, or to wish that
they had never come to the party. All they wished was for the men outside to go
home, turn off the bullhorns, and let them all have a night’s sleep on the
floor. Every now and then there would be a few free moments when no one was
speaking, and in that false and temporary quiet a different kind of noise would
come forward, tree frogs and locusts and the metallic clicking of guns being
loaded and cocked.

Mr. Hosokawa later claimed he did not close his
eyes all night, but Gen heard him snoring sometime after four
A.M.
.
It was
a soft, whistling snore like wind coming in beneath a doorjamb, and it gave Gen
comfort. There was other snoring in the room as people fell asleep for ten
minutes or twenty, but even asleep they remained obedient and stayed flat on
their backs. The accompanist had worked his way out of his suit jacket so
slowly he never appeared to move at all and he made a little balled-up pillow
on which Roxane Coss could lay her head. All night long the muddy boots stepped
over them, between them.

When the guests lay down the night before there
had been a great deal of drama, which served as a distraction to what might
happen, but by morning fear had coated the inside of every mouth. They had been
awake thinking over the alternatives, which did not seem good. The rough brush
of beards had sprung up during the night and eye makeup had been smeared from
crying. Dinner jackets and dresses were crumpled, shoes were tight. Backs and
hips ached from the hard floor and necks were locked straight ahead. Without
exception, every last person on the floor needed to use the facilities.

In addition to suffering what the others
suffered, Mr. Hosokawa bore the terrible burden of responsibility. All of these
people had come for his birthday. By agreeing to a party under what he knew to
be false pretense, he had contributed to the endangerment of every life in the
room. Several employees of Nansei had come, including Akira Yamamoto, the
director of project development, and Tetsuya Kato, senior vice president. Vice
presidents from Sumitomo Bank and the Bank of Japan, Satoshi Ogawa and Yoshiki
Aoi, respectively, had also come, despite Mr. Hosokawa’s personal and repeated
requests that they not attend. The host country had called them as well,
explaining that it was a birthday party for their most valued customer and of
course they wouldn’t want to miss a birthday party. The ambassador from
Japan
had made
the call. He was lying on the doormat now in the entry way.

But the hostage that pained Mr. Hosokawa the
most (and even as he felt this he knew it was wrong, to place a higher value on
one life over another) was Roxane Coss. She had been brought to this dismal
jungle to sing for him. What vanity on his part to think this was an
appropriate
gift.
It was enough to listen to her
recordings. It had been more than enough to see her at
Covent
Garden
, the Metropolitan. Why did he think it would be any better
if he could stand close enough to smell her perfume? It was not better. Her voice,
if he could be very honest, was not flattered by the acoustics in the living
room. It made him uncomfortable to notice the supreme athleticism of her mouth,
to see so clearly her damp pink tongue when she opened up wide and wider still.
The lower teeth were not straight. It had been an honor but nothing that would
be worth the harm that could come to her, to all of them. He tried to raise his
head just a half an inch to see her. She was almost near him, since he had been
standing in the front of the room when she was singing. Her eyes were closed
now, though he imagined she was not sleeping. It was not that she was a very
beautiful woman, if one could see her objectively, lying on a living-room
floor. Each of her features seemed a bit too large for her face, her nose was
too long,
her
mouth was too wide. Her eyes, certainly,
were bigger, rounder, than average eyes, but no one could complain about her
eyes. They reminded him of the blue of the rindo flowers that grew near
Lake
Nagano
.
He smiled to think of that, and wanted to turn and tell his thought to Gen. He
looked instead to Roxane Coss, whose face he had tirelessly studied in program
notes and CD inserts. Her shoulders were sloping. Her neck, perhaps, could be
longer.
A longer neck?
He cursed himself. What was he
thinking? None of it mattered. No one could see her objectively anyway. Even
those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing,
found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and so
poured like light through her skin. Then all that could be seen was the weight
and the gloss of her hair and the pale pink of her cheeks and her beautiful
hands. The accompanist caught sight of Mr. Hosokawa’s raised head and Mr.
Hosokawa quickly returned it to the floor. The terrorists were beginning to tap
some of the guests and motion them to stand and follow. It was easy for Mr.
Hosokawa to pretend he had only raised his head to see about that.