Ann Patchett (6 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
By ten in the morning a certain amount of
whispering had begun. It wasn’t so difficult to sneak in a word or two with all
the noise that blasted in through the windows and the constant up and down of
the guests being led into the hall. That was what had started the whispering.
At first they all believed they were to be taken away and shot a handful at a
time, probably in the garden behind the house. Victor Fyodorov fingered the
package of cigarettes in his jacket pocket and wondered if they would let him
smoke for a minute before gunning him down. He could feel the rivulets of sweat
combing back his hair. It would almost be worth getting shot if he could have a
cigarette now. The room was painfully still as they waited for the report, but
when that first group returned, smiling, nodding, they whispered to the ones
next to them, “Toilet, bathroom, WC.” The word spread.
Everyone was led away with one escort: for
every guest, a dirt-smeared young terrorist sporting several weapons. Some of
the young men merely walked beside the guests, while others held the upper arm
with varying degrees of aggression. The boy who came for Roxane Coss took her
hand rather than her arm and held it in the manner of sweethearts looking for a
deserted stretch of beach. He wasn’t pretty the way the boy who held her hand
earlier had been.
There were those who believed they would be
killed, who over and over again saw the movie of themselves being led out the
door at night and shot in the back of the head, but Roxane Coss thought no such
thing. Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one
was going to shoot a soprano. She was prepared to be nice, to let her hand be
held, but when the time was right she would be the one to get away. She was
sure of it. She smiled at the boy when he opened the door to the bathroom for
her. She half expected he would follow her inside. When he didn’t she locked
the door, sat down on the toilet, and cried, great, gulping sobs. She wrapped
her hair around her hands and covered her eyes. Goddamn her agent who said this
was worth all the money! Her neck was stiff and she felt like she might be
getting a cold, but who wouldn’t catch a cold sleeping on a floor. Wasn’t she
Tosca? Hadn’t she jumped off the back of the Castle Sant’ Angelo night after
night? Tosca was harder than this. After this she would only play in
and
She said the three words over and over again until she could regulate her
breathing and was able to stop the crying.
Cesar, the boy with the gun who waited in the
hallway, did not rap on the door to hurry her along as was done with other
guests. He leaned against the wall outside and imagined her bending down
towards the gold faucet to rinse out her mouth. He pictured her washing her
face and hands with the little shell-shaped soaps. He could still hear the
songs that she sang in his head and very quietly he hummed the parts that he
remembered to pass the time,
Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore,
non feci mai male ad anima viva!
Strange how those sounds stayed so
clearly in his mind. She was not quick in the bathroom, but what could you ask
of such a woman? She was a masterpiece. Nothing about her could be rushed. When
she finally came out her hand was slightly damp and thrilling-cool to the
touch.
Vissi d’arte,
he wanted to say to her, but he
didn’t know what it meant. When he returned her to her spot near the piano, the
accompanist was gone, and then, in a moment, he was returned as well. He looked
considerably worse than the other guests. The accompanist was a troubling moon
shade of white and his eyes were rimmed in bloody red. He was held tightly on
either side by Gilbert and Francisco, two of the bigger boys. They used both of
their hands to drag him forward. At first it appeared that the accompanist had
tried to make a run for a window or door and had been overpowered, but when
they went to return him to his spot, his knees folded beneath him as if they
were two sheets of notebook paper asked to support his entire body weight. He
slipped to the floor in a crumpling faint. The terrorists gave Roxane a piece
of advice or information in Spanish, but she did not speak Spanish.
She sat up a bit, unsure whether or not she was
allowed to sit up, and pulled his legs out straight. He was a large man, not
heavy, but
tall,
and she struggled against the unnatural
arrangement of his limbs. At first she had thought he was playing possum. She
had heard of hostages pretending to be blind to facilitate their release, but
no one could pretend their skin into that color. His head wagged dully from
side to side when she shook him. One of the
waiters who was
near her leaned over and tugged the accompanist’s arms down to his sides from
where they had been pinned beneath him.
“What’s happened to you?” she whispered. A set
of muddy boots walked past. She stretched out beside the accompanist and took
his wrist between her fingers.
Finally, the accompanist stirred and sighed and
turned to face her, blinking rapidly as if he were trying to rouse himself from
a deep and wonderful sleep. “Nothing will happen to you,” he told Roxane Coss,
but even with his bluish lips pressed against the side of her head, his voice
was distant, exhausted.
“There will be a request for ransom,” Mr.
Hosokawa told Gen. They were both watching Roxane and her accompanist now,
thinking at several points that the accompanist was dead, but then he would
shift or sigh. “It is Nansei’s policy to pay ransom, any ransom. They’ll pay it
for both of us.” He could speak in his smallest voice, a sound too minimal to
ever be called a whisper, and still Gen understood him perfectly. “They will
pay it for her as well. It would only be fitting. She is here on my account.”
And the accompanist, especially if he were sick, he should not be forced to
stay. Mr. Hosokawa sighed. Actually, in some sense, everyone in the room was
here on his account and he wondered what such a ransom could add up to. “I feel
that I have brought this on us.”
“You are not holding a gun,” Gen said. The
sound of their own Japanese spoken so softly it could not have been heard
twelve centimeters
away,
comforted them. “It was the
President they meant to take last night.”
“I wish they had him,” Mr. Hosokawa said.
On the other side of the room near the bottom
edge of a gold brocade sofa, Simon and Edith Thibault held each other’s hand. They
didn’t settle in with the rest of the French but kept to themselves. They
looked very much a pair, nearly brother and sister, with their dark straight
hair and blue eyes. They lay on the floor of the dinner party with so much
dignity and ease they looked not like two people forced to the floor at
gunpoint, but like two people who had simply grown tired of standing. While
everyone else lay rigid and trembling, the Thibaults leaned in, her head on his
shoulder, his cheek pressed to the crown of her head. He was thinking less of
the terrorists and more of the remarkable fact that his wife’s hair smelled of
lilacs.
In
Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great
deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been
two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various
jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly
relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands
of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire
days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think
what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by
herself, Edith as his wife.
Then, in a wave of government promises made and
retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was
always referred to as
ce
pays maudit,
“this godforsaken country.” Both of them
faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of
days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again,
like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his
youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he
had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in
every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation,
the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in
the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on
her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in
was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known
and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads
and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he
was
her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to
these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might
never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.
“They don’t seem to be in any hurry to kill
anyone,” Edith Thibault whispered to her husband, her lips touching his ear.
For as far as the eye can see there is nothing
but white sand and bright blue water. Edith walking into the ocean for a swim
turns back to him, the water lapping at her thighs. “Shall I bring you a fish?”
she calls, and then she is gone, diving under a wave.
“They’ll separate us later,” Simon said.
She wrapped her arm tightly around his and took
his hand again. “Let them try.”
There had been a mandatory seminar last year in
protocol for the capture of an embassy. He assumed that the rules would apply
for overthrown dinner parties as well. They would take the women away. They
would— He stopped. He honestly didn’t remember what came after that. He
wondered if when they took Edith, if she might have something with her,
something of hers he could
keep,
an earring? How
quickly we settle for less!
thought
Simon Thibault.
What had been a few pockets of careful
whispering at first was now a steady hum as people returned from the bathrooms.
Having stood up and stretched their legs, they didn’t feel as obedient on the
floor. Quietly, people began to have tentative conversations, a murmur and then
a dialogue rose up from the floor, until the room became a cocktail party in
which everyone was lying prone. Finally, General Alfredo was driven to shoot
another hole in the ceiling, which put an end to that.
A few
high-pitched yelps and then silence.
Not a minute after the gun went
off,
there was a knock on the door.
Everyone turned to look at the door. With all
of the demands, the shuffle of crowds, barking of dogs, chop of helicopters
dipping overhead, no one had knocked, and everyone in the house tensed, as one
tenses when one does not wish to be disturbed at home. The young terrorists
looked nervously at one another, taking deep breaths and slipping their fingers
into the empty loop of the trigger guards as if to say that they were ready to
kill someone now. The three Generals conferred with one another, did a bit of
pointing until there was a line of young men on either side of the door. Then
General Benjamin drew his own gun and, nudging the Vice President’s shoulder
with the rounded edge of his boot, made him get up and answer the door.
It only stood to reason that whoever was on the
other side of the door had every intention of coming in firing and better they
serve up Ruben Iglesias to this mistake. He got up from the nest he had made by
the empty fireplace with his wife and three children, two bright-eyed girls and
one small boy, whose face was sweaty and red from the work of such deep sleep. The
governess, Esmeralda, stayed with them. She was from the north and did not
hesitate to glare openly at the terrorists. The Vice President kept looking at
the ceiling, afraid that last bullet might have nicked a pipe. That would be a
hell of a thing to deal with now. The right side of his face, which changed and
grew hourly, was now swollen into a meaty yellow red and his right eye was shut
tight. Still the wound bled and bled. Twice he had had to get a new dinner
napkin. As a boy, Ruben Iglesias prayed long hours on his knees in the Catholic
church that God would grant him the gift of height, a gift He had not seen fit
to grant a single member of his extended family. “God will know what to give
you,” the priests had told him without a hint of interest, and they were right.
Being short had made him the second-most-important man in his government, and
now it had very probably saved him from serious injury as the blow had landed
more on the strong plane of his skull than the comparatively delicate hinge of
his jaw. His face served as a reminder that everything had not gone smoothly
the night before, another good message to those outside. When the Vice
President stood, stiff and aching, General Benjamin put the slender broomstick
of the rifle’s barrel between his shoulder blades and steered him forward. His
own condition, always exacerbated by stress, had begun to bloom one tiny
pustule at the end of every nerve and he longed for a hot compress almost as
much as he longed for revolution. The knock repeated itself.