Half the Day Is Night (16 page)

“They usually go off.”

“Either they do when they come in or they don't at all,” the lieutenant said. “Usually once they've fucked with the trigger it either works or it doesn't.”

“What about Desalines?”

“That one had been there awhile. Usually, though, they go off or they do not.”

The officer nodded, “This one probably won't—”

The explosion was a thud-thump, the watertight doors into the garage held for maybe a tenth of a second and then there was the hammer blow of the water hitting the main doors. The water immediately muted the sound, giving it an odd, flat quality.

Then silence.

David raised his head. He was behind a car with the cat shielded by his body. The force of the water hitting the big garage doors had warped them, bowed them out, but they must have been built to do that. The lights slid down one wall, across the street, angled up another wall and across the warped doors, meeting and forming and splintering again, back down the walls. He was the only person who had ducked, everyone else stood staring. He tensed for the firing to begin, or for the mortars to start elephant walking down the street.

Somebody whistled appreciatively.

David got up. This was just his job, no one was going to start shooting. He looked at Mayla, standing next to an officer, staring at the doors, and she was not anyone he knew.

Screw it. Someone else was handling it. The walls rose up, more sharply than the spine of the ridge of highlands behind the wash, where Namibia and Kalahari almost met, about Rehoboth. His knee ached, remembering Rehoboth. He cradled the cat who was too frightened to complain. Nobody was looking at him. They were walking to the doors, or reaching into their cars to call the station.

An officer told the crowd to disperse. It was only a dozen people but David stepped back through them, became part of them, walked down the street trying to give the impression of purpose. He kept his head down and did not look back. At the end of the street he waited. The tunnel buses ran fairly often, although he'd never taken one, he'd seen them. He hoped he didn't have to wait long. He counted slowly, in French, and at 512 one coasted around the bend. He looked back.

Tim Bennet was tall enough and blond enough to stand out in the group. He was looking at David. Even from the distance David could tell.

He didn't know what to do. He expected Tim would shout, say something to someone. He put his foot on the step.

Tim Bennet was watching him, but he didn't move.

David got on and paid with change out of his pocket, “The cat is a problem?” he asked, hoping he would not have to get off and let the cat go, or walk.

“No problem,” the driver said.

He hadn't even looked at the front of the bus to see if it said where it was going. He knew where he was going.

Away.

6

House Arrest

The blue and whites brought her home in a patrol car. She had to stand on the street and use the intercom to ask Jude to open the door. Then she had to go to her grandfather who was eating soup and tell him, “Someone blew up my house, sent a bomb in the mail and it blew up.”

Her grandfather looked up at her, holding the spoon in his shaking hand. “What did you
do?
” he demanded.

He wasn't asking her what she did when it happened, he was asking her what she did to cause it.

“I don't know,” she said, honestly. And then, to her great embarrassment, she felt the heat in her face and the threatening tears. She cleared her throat to explain that she thought that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but when she tried to speak, her voice shook and broke. “I don't know,” she managed again and he looked away.

He wanted her to stop crying. He didn't know what to do when she cried. He hated crying, it made him nervous.

He waited, and she looked at the vid. The vid was sitting on the counter where he could watch it while he ate. Jude had put on the mute when they came in, and a man and a woman were standing in a jungle, speaking intently and soundlessly to each other.

Finally she said again, “I don't know.”

“You stay here, Mayla Lee,” he said gently.

Just that. But it made her cry and Jude put his arms around her and told her it was all right, that she was safe now. Her grandfather stood up and patted her back awkwardly. She thought she was crying from gratitude. He was telling her that he loved her enough to bring her trouble into his house.

Anything could happen. And if anything could happen, then true love was trusting, wasn't it?

*   *   *

David Dai had disappeared. The blue and whites thought that it was possible that there had been collusion between David and Anna Eminike. An officer sat on the sheet-covered couch in Mayla's gram's sitting room. “It explains why he runs, and why he is hard to find. Because he has help to hide, you see?” The blue and white was a chubby young island boy with big eyes and an air of earnest helpfulness.

It didn't sound right to Mayla. If David were working with
La Mano de Diós
then why had he still been in the house when the bomb arrived?

“He was a dupe,” the officer said. “
La Mano de Diós
used him. They didn't tell him the bomb was going to come.”

“Why would he go to them for help to hide if they used him?”

“Maybe they had made a plan, not expecting him to be alive to use it. To make him think they would help him. And now he is using it.”

She pointed out that David came to her immediately when he was approached in the parking.

The officer thought about this. “These people, anyone connected with
La Mano de Diós,
they all are under constant surveillance,” he said. “Maybe they were afraid that we would find out that he was working with them. They met him in the parking, and to divert the suspicions of any watchers he pretended to turn them away.” He nodded to himself, warming to his own theory, liking the taste of it in his mouth. “And when you were shot at in the parking the gunman had intended to miss. They were establishing Dai as a target.”

“What was the point, the profit,” she asked. “Why plant a spy in my house? There wasn't anything for them to learn, I don't have any information.”

“Connections.” He rolled his eyes. “
La Mano de Diós
looks for patterns.”

God's surgeons. One event has innumerable ramifications, ripples in Mandelbrot patterns of chaos, and God told Anna Eminike the things to do to initiate God's patterns. Murder this person. Bomb that house. Sense in every moment, divine inspiration in every random action. God alone saw whole.

“We aren't saying that he is working with them,” the officer said. “We're just considering the possibility.” He made this qualification without real conviction. The sheet he was sitting on had a pattern of pale washed flowers in pink. Her gram had liked pink. Mayla's sheets were gone. She had not had any pink sheets in her whole house and now she was back sleeping on pink sheets.

“He'd only been here a month,” Mayla said. “It's not very likely that they could recruit him and convert him in a month.”

“Maybe he met Eminike in Africa,” the officer said.

“That's pretty thin, isn't it?” she asked.

“Why did he run?” the officer asked.

She didn't know. That was the simple truth, she didn't know why he had run. She didn't know why her house was gone.

“I think he'd had it,” Tim said. Tim had watched him get on the bus. He said David had just walked to the end of the street, waited until one came and got on.

“And you didn't think about stopping him?” The blue and white asked.

He just sounded curious but Tim squirmed. “I figured,” Tim said, “if he wanted to tell somebody he would have. I wasn't thinking about him being a possible terrorist, I mean, he kept talking about how he wasn't the right person to work for Mayla and about going home and he said how he thought that this country was crazy. I just thought that enough had happened that the guy should be allowed to leave if he wanted to. I was beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to go somewhere else, you know, standing out there.”

“Where did you think he was going?” the officer asked.

“I don't know,” Tim said.

“Did you think he would come back, get in touch? That he was going to see friends?”

“I wasn't thinking about anything,” Tim said. “You know, Mayla's house had just been blown up.” But then he shook his head. “No, I guess I wouldn't say he'd come back.”

“Why not?” the officer said.

Tim stared at his hands. Finally he said, “If you'd seen him. Just the way he looked, you know.”

“Try to explain,” the officer said. He was smarter than he acted, more patient than Mayla has suspected and she suddenly felt a chill.

“I don't know, purposeful, I guess. Like … I don't know.”

The officer prompted, “Purposeful. Like he knew where he was going?”

“Of course he knew where he was going,” Tim said, “it's a bloody dead-end street. And no, I'm not saying he was going to meet some frigging terrorists.”

“What are you saying?”

Tim shook his head. “If you'd seen him, you'd know what I mean.”

“Ah,” the blue and white said.

Oh God, Mayla thought, they were going to pin it on David.

*   *   *

Mayla's grandfather's house had breath—cool air moved in the rooms and the tall peacock feathers drifted—but no life. By Caribbean standards it was old. It had been built when the first and second levels of Julia were the only levels, sixty years ago. It was, in its way, a frontier house: built in a big square and starkly simple, just a concrete warren of blind rooms and corridors closed in on itself.

Her gram had tried to make it pretty. She had put mirrors on the walls to create windows and had filled the rooms with spindly wooden tables covered with lace and tall red and yellow Chinese vases filled with pale fronds of pampas grass and peacock feathers. When she was a girl Mayla had loved her gram's things.

The mirrors reflected mirrors on the opposite walls so that the tables covered with knickknacks and pictures of cousins and family and the Virgin in silver frames were reflected in infinite progression. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, Mayla thought she saw movement in the rooms at the backs of the mirrors.

Paranoia. Or just plain fear.

She was back in her old room. The bed was still pink, the walls the palest rose. In the drawers were old things she hadn't bothered to take with her when she moved out: clothes ten years out of date, a bracelet with a little wirework horsecharm dangling off of it that was supposed to be a voudoun sign—they had been big when she was in school—and a box of hair solution to streak her hair metallic silver because Terez, who was her best friend, had streaked hers gold. She threw them out.

“What are you doing?” Jude asked her in the hall.

“Cleaning up my room,” she said. Strange behavior, she thought. Here she was, reduced to almost nothing but the clothes on her back, and she was throwing out whatever else she could find. She threw out everything in all the drawers. There were a couple of dresses in the closet that she could still wear to the bank. Her gray dress, the cliché of the banker gray dress, without style or taste but perfectly functional, she could wear that. Her oyster-colored dress. It had the funny Egyptian linen collar that made it look dated, but she would only wear it until she could get some more things.

In the top of the closet she found a shoe box with a rubber band around it. She slid it off the shelf thinking it was full of letters or something, but when she opened it up, it was full of picture cards. On top was a card of a conical volcano, perfect as a film set, not real.

She turned it over.

Hi Princess,

Things are beautiful in Bali! It's hot hot hot! I'm going to be here awhile, maybe in a few months I can bring you here for a visit.

Love, Dad.

She looked at the date, she would have been eleven years old. When she was eleven her parents had been gone for five years. They had left when she was six.

When she was six. She closed her eyes and thought of being six. What was six? Her parents gone to see her grandfather's family in Hawaii. Cousins. Caribe had still been part of the U.S. First Hawaiian of Caribe was still connected to First Hawaiian of Honolulu and the Lings of Hawaii.

When she was six, Enzalo Estaves y Otoya launched a violent independence movement. She could see her gram filling the bathtubs with water in case it was shut off—although she pictured her gram as an old thin-legged lady in tights and a cardigan. When she was six her grandmother was, what, in her fifties? Her hair wasn't gray, she kept it blonde. With effort the blonde gram from ims could be superimposed. They grew algae in buckets and plastic tubs and they had an old-fashioned air recycler sitting in the kitchen, all in case the air was cut off. All of the house staff left except Jude, who cooked for them and ate with them. If the air went bad they planned to shut off most of the big house and live in the kitchen, bathroom and dining room, all four of them including Jude—but in their part of the city the air stayed good.

Her grandfather was home all of the time. President Enzalo Estaves y Otoya nationalized the bank. He sat around dressed like it was Sunday afternoon, in tights and shirts and alpargatas, sandals like slippers with cotton soles. He was angry all the time.

“Be quiet,” her gram would say, “your grandfather is worried about a lot of things.”

Her mother and father sent cards, first from Hawaii, then from Spain. The cards came in bunches wrapped in string, some of them sent three or four months before and some only two weeks old. Then nothing for a few months. The mail was “interrupted.” Like someone speaking.