Indígena

It wasn’t the guns that bothered her, but rather the heat, which was the true killing machine. Guns had always been with her; they figured in her earliest memories. Her father dismantling a revolver on the kitchen table as she picked at her greasy Ulster fry. The RUC boys armed to the teeth outside the greengrocer’s smashed door, outfitted for war in a dank city street. High-powered rifles with sniper scopes laid out in the boot like firewood, or cradled like infants as her uncles stalked through the muddy darkness along the right-of-way. Guns were cityscape. By the age of twelve she could identify make and model from a ten-yard remove and judge ammunition by the results it fetched: peering down from the second floor of the grammar school as boys shot pigeons off ledges, she could guess the calibre by the damage done. When she turned fourteen, her brother Roddy made sure she had her own pistol, a battered Webley, and knew when to use it.

Despite himself, Moore had been impressed with her expertise when they met. It was in the first days after the flood, when men were still sandbagging the riverbank and women tracked red mud from house to house, the rain forest floor roiling with steam. The humidity was absolute.

Moore regarded her without emotion, as was his way even with close associates and lovers, his pitted face a perfect mask. He waited for her as if he’d been the one to pose the question. But men no longer intimidated her, and she stared at him with clean concentration, refusing to back down. After a methodical sip of beer he said: “American. ’72.”

“Brilliant. Gas ring holding up?”

She saw a calculation ripple across Moore’s forehead, where you could sometimes read his thoughts. She’d got his attention. Possibly he’d never met a woman who could talk weaponry with such composure and mastery. “Thing is,” she said, “over time that ring’ll fail you and you’ll short-stroke. You won’t get one bloody round off.” She saw him straighten in his cane chair, shift his stocky shoulders awkwardly. He would prefer it if she left, perhaps—or failing that, stepped over to dine with him. “I’m Maeve, by the way. And your own good self?”

By way of reply he turned his chair half away from her, which at the same time left it half facing her.

She knew the evening mosquitoes would soon roam in from the river, moving across the open-air patio in ragged death squads. Tontons Macoutes, she called them, but the joke was lost on everyone. The locals knew almost nothing of Manaus, much less of Haiti. What still shocked her was that the American eco-tourists didn’t follow her, either—her guests might have the wherewithal to travel from Chicago or Kansas City to the Brazilian interior, but they had no more knowledge of history than a back-country indígeno. They knew nothing of the Troubles, nothing of the Duvalier bloodbath—nothing of her world. Disgraceful, but their ignorance protected her.

She could see the lolling river from where she sat, the water brown as shoe leather, foul-smelling and noxious since the rains had washed the shantytown away. The makeshift hovels had been well upstream, far out of town, but day by day one saw more evidence of them as the river continued to lick at the remains. Corpses had been spotted drifting past, the odd sling chair or Styrofoam cooler, bloated dogs and feral pigs, a buoyant crucifix swirling in an eddy as if possessed by the soul of a dervish. Mangrove roots trapped petrol cans, hats, bottles. The carnage had quickly driven the late-season tourists away, starting with the Kapsteins, young New Yorkers who’d been staying in Treetop Lodge 1 with its perfect view of the fetid watercourse. Maeve refunded their money without argument. Two Canadian couples were expected at the weekend; she wondered if they’d heard.

Without tourists the town deflated, its tiny vein of commerce collapsing. She and Moore were the only guests Casa Ribeiro had served in days. She smelled pinga on the proprietor’s breath tonight, and who could blame him? The drenching heat, the fleeing foreigners, the loss of a cousin in the wash-out—it had hit him hard. Relieved of her normal chores, all five treehouse cabanas empty, she’d been eating lunch and dinner at Casa Ribeiro mostly to make sure Paulo Ribeiro didn’t do anything rash. Just now he was drifting toward her table with a worried look, frowning at her fish. “O peixe não tá bom, senhora Kelly?” No, she smiled, the fish is brilliant. Just in no rush here. He’d insisted it was caught and iced before the flood poisoned the river—an antediluvian fish. To reassure him she took up knife and fork and surgically removed the head, setting it aside for a stray. This seemed satisfactory, and he moved on to his other guest with a swaying step.

When Paulo wandered back to the kitchen she expected the sporadic conversation with Moore to continue in some way, but it did not. He made no eye contact, only finishing his beer and quickly dispatching his grilled chicken. When he was done he laid a large bill on the table, took up the Widowmaker, donned his tarp hat and walked out, his white shirt soaked through in the shape of a giant hand. Only when she heard two car doors slam and saw a Land Rover with darkened windows pull away did Maeve realize that someone had been keeping watch over Moore the whole time, and not only over Moore.

She knew who he was, of course; everyone did. He was the gringo who lived in the razor wire compound perched on a red dirt promontory three miles up the private road, the longest paved stretch in the area. The place had been built for a would-be cattle rancher who’d died before a single tree could be felled for pastureland. Three years ago, Moore had appeared out of nowhere, bought the land and house for back taxes and turned it into a fortress, importing workers from a distant charcoal camp disbanded not long before. It was assumed the old man didn’t want locals involved for security reasons—an absurd notion, paranoia imported from another world. Speculation was that he was a Colombian involved at the highest levels of the drug trade, perhaps a cartel banker, but she suspected he was just a rich American eccentric, some software millionaire or stock trader living out a colonial fantasy. In the few words they’d exchanged she hadn’t noticed a particular accent, but that didn’t mean anything in an expat; his name was English, but that meant even less, as one assumed it wasn’t his real one.

The man called Moore was self-sufficient and generally invisible, which made her wonder what he was doing here at Paulo’s, tucking into a plate of chicken like anyone else. The compound had its own weedy airstrip, a holdover from earlier days; Moore received weekly cargo flights said to deliver not just staples but also French wines and city whores, though this last smelled of hopeful fantasy. Nor did the gringo rely on anyone else for electricity, fresh water, medical treatment, security. He had generators, purifiers, a staff doctor, a private militia with evident firepower. And he had uplinks: a bristling array of dishes and antennas connected the place with the greater world, including, some thought, a private satellite stationed overhead. Because he revealed nothing of himself, all wonders seemed possible.

Maeve’s second encounter with Moore—if indirect—came the very morning after meeting him at Casa Ribeiro. As she was fretting over accounts, the Land Rover of the night before deposited two of Moore’s palace guards at the gate. Her stomach turned at the sight of them: as a girl of twelve she’d seen just such a Land Rover disgorge two RUC men who’d then put a rifle butt through her cousin’s skull alongside the Falls Road. She didn’t want this lot on her land. She strode quickly to the gate but didn’t unlock it, waiting for them to state their business.

The driver was mulatto but the other was pure blue-black, a stunning man in a military-looking uniform. Looking past the pressed khaki she guessed he’d come up in some Rio or São Paulo slum, as much an outsider here as she was. “Miss Kelly,” he said.

“Herself.”

“I am Xoque,” he said, revealing crude teeth. He pronounced it as in English, Shock—just the sort of blustering gang name they gave themselves in the Rio favelas. “Security chief for Mr. Moore.” It appeared the brief exchange over Moore’s Widowmaker had raised questions.

“What of it?”

Xoque eyed the locked gate; considered his options. He had not expected this reception. At last he said, “Mr. Moore invites you to lunch at your earliest convenience.”

“I’m quite busy.”

Xoque looked past her, saw the empty treehouses thrown open for airing. “As you like. Perhaps you’ll call when you have an opening, Miss Kelly.” With exaggerated courtesy he handed a business card through the gate and they were gone, the driver putting boot to the board up the mud-stained road.

Maeve had lived in her skin long enough to recognize an interesting disturbance in the membrane that linked her to the world, a flex of the integument, and she felt it now. Throughout the long day she considered Moore’s invitation, and that evening she rang the number on Xoque’s card.

The rest of the rainy season passed without the second flood that everyone had so feared. Television warned that such events would be commonplace now, but the swollen months crawled by without incident, with ordinary rain, and slowly the foreigners returned. Maeve was fully booked. She trained a manager to cover for her on the nights she was away at Moore’s; the place quickly found its rhythm, her coffers filling steadily. Seven months of clement weather set the stunned village back on its feet. But then the rains arrived a month too soon, not cooling the forest as usual but bringing an onslaught of crippling heat. The turn of events was strange enough to be carried on the national news—a death blow. Her late-season bookings were mostly middle-class Brazilian families on holiday, well able to sacrifice the small deposit, and the final month was gutted. In scarcely a week the cabanas were empty.

Maeve was not at peace with the unseasonable heat. It fulminated, like a kind of racehorse lather you couldn’t shake off, the sworn enemy of sleep. Even Haiti had rarely been as bad. By municipal edict the electricity was killed an hour after nightfall, whereupon the electric fans spun down and the ponderous cowl descended. This against a childhood in grey Belfast with its damp and penetrating winter chill.

She slept fitfully, dreaming of broken glass and sirens and whip-like gunshots, fever dreams imposed by the heat and her condition. On such nights her sleep was rife with murderers, IRA men mingling with Tontons Macoutes, the lot of them cursing and scheming in a stew of English, Irish and rapid Creole that only she could decipher. Sometimes her Da was there, sometimes Baby Doc himself; or Jean-Michel with his brimming sexual eyes and dark slender trunk and honed machete, his scent of smoky cooking oil. Certain souls had never abandoned her.

As usual she was awakened by bedlam in the green canopy above. For a long while she lay on her sweaty sheets listening to the cacophony of toucans and araras and howler monkeys, rude and relentless as dengue. The night had drained off some of the heat; this was the hour before the sun would become difficult, as if hurrying to scorch the land before the afternoon rains exploded. The cistern was full and she took a long, tepid shower out back, not caring if the local boys were spying on her again. For all she cared they could watch every day, revel in her shifting contours, track the daily changes in belly and breast. It was all new to her, too. They would learn together.

Back inside the cottage, her clothes were damp and smelled faintly of mildew. Nothing ever truly dried. She threw on a gauzy shift and sandals and dissected a papaya at the tiled table out back, not unhappy to be without guests, willing herself not to think about the money. Two of the treehouses needed thatching and she could not pay to do it. Meanwhile the sun dappled through the canopy deceptively. After breakfast she made a cup of coffee and took to one of the hammocks with a travel magazine someone had left behind, immersing herself in photos of Calcutta while the howlers slalomed down to steal the papaya leavings. They had a vocation. Today she did not.

At eleven she set out for the village, wanting company, intending to lunch early and get back before the rains. Paulo and Ana would be ready with soup and sausages, grilled chicken and black beans and salty farofa, slices of orange and pineapple and farmer’s cheese. With the guests gone this early, lunch had become Maeve’s ritual of coalescence, the arranging of sleep’s debris into the semblance of a personality.

But as she rounded the corner she saw a familiar Land Rover parked outside, one of Moore’s new men leaning against the fender smoking a brown cigarette. A snatch of radio traffic tattered from the open window; he leaned in to take up a walkie-talkie, said a few words in patois, dropped it back in the seat. Only then did he notice the pregnant gringa making slow progress toward him in her airy shift, hazel eyes locked on his. At the sight of her he retrieved the walkie-talkie and relayed a quick report, then stepped back to clear the way.

She strode past him into the cool shadow under the thatch, a macaw flitting away, the scent of grilled meat riding the air.

“Maeve,” a basso voice said from within.

She hadn’t seen Xoque in months, not since she’d broken off with Moore. It appeared he’d been upgraded, his powerful body now outfitted in a white golf shirt, immaculate khaki shorts and expensive sandals. He might have been the doorman at a São Paulo country club, were it not for the SIG Sauer strapped to his thigh. “Not long now,” he said, showing his uneven teeth and pointing to her belly.

“Counting on Lieve,” she replied. Though she was no longer seeing Moore, his private doctor had promised to attend the birth. Moore was not so cruel as to stand in the way. “Lieve’s still up there?”

“You’re invited for lunch,” said Xoque, ignoring the question.

She had no desire to see Moore again but needed to see the doctor with her own eyes. At her age she wasn’t about to give birth with a native midwife. A moment later she was sitting in the rear of the Land Rover with Xoque, as the driver sped them past the blockish fountain and out of town, half the village looking on.

As they approached the compound Maeve could see that something was wrong. The covered veranda was populated with valises and trunks; staff were scuttling past with furniture; Dani, the elderly carpenter, was kneeling before Moore’s prized Matisse, measuring it for a crate he would build on the spot. In the gravel turnabout, the gardener was methodically smashing several computers to pieces. On the tennis court raged a bonfire heaped with documents. Moore’s life was being dismantled before her eyes.

“Xoque, what’s this?”

“No longer safe for Mr. Moore.”

Moore had warned her once that this might happen. Someone, whether the Americans or Interpol or some new Brazilian official he hadn’t yet bought off, would find him here and move in to arrest him, to break it up, whatever it was. Moore was fully prepared for that day, as was now evident. It was business.

Once inside the house, Xoque showed her to the air-conditioned dining room with its vast panoramic window overlooking the forest canopy. The room had been cleared of all furniture but the baronial table, a single chair with a silver place setting laid before it, and on the opposite wall one of Moore’s most prized artworks, a Munch lithograph of a tubercular child whose wistful gaze Maeve had always found captivating. Beside her plate sat a large manila envelope fastened with string.

As Xoque turned to go she said, “Is Moore coming?”

“Moore is gone,” said Xoque. “Para sempre. Forever.”

Alone in the room where she’d first dined with the old man, down the long hallway from where she’d slept with him for months, Maeve sat and waited, gazing out the irresistible window. The sun had already disappeared; above the western edge of the forest a slate-grey belly of cloud glowered, gravid with the rains to come. In the course of a few minutes she saw it advance a fair distance toward the already swollen river, dipping lower as it came on, darkening the room. An erotic moment, the pause before release.

The first fit of lightning came as the cook, Neli, wheeled in a bountiful lunch of imported salmon, garden greens, white asparagus grown under lamps of Moore’s own design—a faithful copy of the first meal she’d shared with Moore nearly a year before, in the aftermath of the flood. A moment later Neli returned with a chilled Riesling, filling Maeve’s glass without a word.

“Neli,” Maeve said.

“Senhora Kelly?”

“What’s going on here?”

A look of fright crossed the youthful face. She spoke in a whisper. “Senhor Moore left in a hurry. Last night, by plane.”

“Alone, Neli?”

“With the pilot and Dr. Lieve. The pilot returned this morning.”

So Lieve was gone. Maeve felt the baby shift inside her.

“You’ll be all right, Neli? He’s provided for you somehow?”

“By the grace of God, senhora.”

“Will you—” But at this moment the storm exploded over the forest with a stunning flash and a cannon shot of thunder. Both women shied from the window, joined in common reflex. Together they watched the sudden assault on the canopy, the highest tier of green buckling under the torrent. The storm rumbled through the thick window pane in a vast, slow-moving detonation, crowding the room, turning the light abruptly violet. Maeve felt the cook stop breathing. They both saw that it was no ordinary storm.

“Neli, you must go to your family. One of the men can drive you down before the roads wash out. Should I tell Xoque?” Neli nodded quickly, plainly afraid, but whether of the storm or Xoque, Maeve couldn’t guess. “Fetch him, Neli. There’s a good girl.”

When an irritable Xoque appeared, Neli cowering behind, Maeve ordered him to get Neli and the rest of the staff to safety.

“I have a thousand details,” he protested. “Mr. Moore—”

“Moore is gone forever. You said so yourself.”

“I’ll send one of the men.” Over his shoulder he said something harsh to Neli, who hurried off. Then, more gently, to Maeve: “You can’t stay here. They’re coming.”

“I know. But not during this.” As if in reply, the storm hurled a long, full-throated complaint against the town below. Her wineglass jittered on the table. To the east, near her own land, she saw lightning fell two palms at a blow. A cowl of mist rose from the forest floor to graze the understorey.

“The pilot will take you to Moore the moment he can fly again,” said Xoque, and left her to her lonely meal.

As Maeve grazed at her salmon she thought back to her first lunch with Moore.

“You intrigue me, Miss Kelly,” he’d said, “because you’ve mastered the art of staying under radar. You went dark years ago and you’ve stayed that way. Impressive.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

Moore laughed broadly; she hadn’t suspected he was capable of it. To her right, the Dutch doctor studied her plate. “That’s not exactly true, Miss Kelly. My sources are better than most. Though you were a challenge for us, I’ll admit.” He sipped his wine, let this sink in. “By the way, may I call you Miss Flanagan, just for the sake of accuracy?”

Maeve waited to see what else he had.

“All right, then, what do we know? Mary Flanagan, born in Derry two years after her brother Rodney, parents good Catholics. Fled with the family to Belfast after the Bogside riot—perhaps a poor choice. Within a year her father’s in deep with the Provos, a first-class provocateur. An assassin, actually. How am I doing so far?”

For once she was speechless. By whatever means, he’d traced a decades-long trail backward from a Brazilian rainforest to her murderous homeland. She thought of the satellite dishes clustered on the roof, imagined an invisible flow of damning intelligence coursing through them to a screen somewhere in the rambling house. She set her fork down and said nothing, a runnel of sweat wandering down her back despite the air conditioning. Moore went on.

“Next comes a particularly heinous hit—a clergyman in mufti, a noncombatant. A serious error. Mary’s brother Roddy is arrested, but her father escapes to a safe house with two mates. They wait it out. The heat begins to subside—Roddy’s made an example of—and then something odd happens, something I’ll confess I don’t yet understand.”

The Dutch doctor and Moore looked over at Maeve in perfect synchrony. A mute server slipped in to refill her glass, withdrew. The rains would soon trundle in. Even from Moore’s redoubt Maeve could sense the anxiety down in the town, the memory of the flood stirring. There was a world outside the room and she would have liked to escape into it, but Moore’s data held her rapt.

“Perhaps,” said Moore, “you can help me understand how a fugitive IRA hit man turns up in Haiti as adviser to Baby Doc? His teenage daughter in tow?”

It was not for him to know—not yet.

She’d been a girl of sixteen, a virgin with a loaded Webley tucked under her mattress, when her father or brother, it didn’t matter which, shot a Reverend James. She was seventeen when, under cover of darkness, she and her Da shoved off from the Bannock cove, to be intercepted some hours later by a trawler with no running lights, while her Ma stayed behind to pine for Roddy’s acquittal. By unlucky timing she was in the grip of brutal menstrual cramps and then the flu and so would barely recall the rough passage on the cargo freighter, the hold killingly hot as the ship transected the Atlantic and plied southward. The day came when her Da called her onto the blazing deck and they watched the freighter make its ponderous landfall in Haiti, a country she couldn’t have found on a map.

She’d never seen a black man in her life. Now her Da would be working for one—not just any black man, but one anointed President for Life, a blustering connoisseur of killers who’d admired the IRA’s handiwork from afar. None of which she’d fully understand until the evening when she lay half-hidden in the vetiver with Jean-Michel, her very own winsome killer, and teased his rose nipple with the tip of his machete until he told her the truth. By then Da was famous among the Tontons, Irishman nan fou, the crazy Irishman. Her lover was in awe of him. It made her proud. Only later, after a report of Tontons eating the raw heart of a girl exactly her age in Gonaïves, did the grit of it make her flee.

This much she would eventually tell Moore, late one night in his lavish bedroom under the softly watchful eye of a Degas dancer. A bottle of Margaux sped her along, and her lover’s rapt attention as well: she felt his admiration, one canny fugitive’s for another. Day by day she was taming him, this rough, unhandsome American with expensive tastes, and it excited her. She could not deny it. That he would not say what his business was or where his money came from would have troubled a different sort of woman, but she, more than anyone, understood the value of secrets. She stood with him on the veranda and shot monkeys out of the jacarandas with his Widowmaker, all of it coming back to her in an electric surge.

Yet she would not stay with him for more than a night at a time. It was a matter of principle, and she had a business to run, guests to tend to. Rubem, the manager he’d hired for her, panicked easily when problems arose, when an American collapsed with heat stroke or the water supply was obstructed by a dead macaque. And so Xoque and a driver—eventually just Xoque—would spirit her back into town, into her own world, leaving Moore on his red hill to observe her withdrawal through the U-boat gunner’s scope mounted to the balcony railing.

In the empty dining room of Moore’s empty house she abandons her salmon and Riesling, tasting nothing, unable to take her gaze off the worsening storm. The rain is torrential now. The river will soon make a lunge for the town, rushing in through gullies carved by last year’s flood in disastrous and raging flumes. Against this rain the new levee, really just a low wall of leaking sandbags, will be worthless. She imagines Paulo and Ana standing in the swamped ruins of Casa Ribeiro; then the elderly Nogueiras, lame and demented, consumed by the swirling brown waters. Infants will be carried off, swallowed. Maeve pictures her own home lifted off its foundations and sent barging down the riotous estuary. Yet in Moore’s aerie all is calm and abstract. She gazes into the storm like a diver inspecting a vast wall of coral, in no hurry to surface, Munch’s dying girl looking on with her.

Neli doesn’t come to remove her dishes—a sign that, with luck, she’s been driven home by one of the men. Whatever is happening down in the town, she should be with her kin. Maeve pushes her plate away and takes up the manila envelope beside it, unwinding the string from the clasp, wondering who’s still at large in the echoing house.

Moore has left her the briefest of farewell notes, clipped to a printout filled with rows of numbers.

Maeve, I’ve had to leave.

Join me—it may not be safe for you there, given our association. João will fly you out discreetly. I make this offer in earnest.

But knowing you, you’ll refuse. If so, please accept the attached as a parting gift—something to help you get by, and the town too, if you like. The Munch you love is yours for the taking. But I do hope you’ll come. – Moore.

On the printout he’s scrawled, Each of these should be good for 30 days after first use. Clean and untraceable. The accounts clear offshore, then route to yours; they can’t find you.

She puzzles over the thicket of digits for a moment before realizing that they are credit card numbers, dozens of them. It sorts quickly in her mind: the uplink, the computers, the priceless artwork and wines. She stares at the pages, then at the green cataclysm on the other side of the window, then at the pages once again, and slips them back in their envelope.

“Xoque!” she calls down the echoing hallway, and while she’s waiting for him she lifts the Munch from its hook, the envelope tucked under her arm.

From her vantage point in Treetop Lodge 2 she can see it all. The brown, muscular arm of the river sweeping across the waterlogged land, goats and dogs and smashed furniture riding it like flies on a horse’s flank. To the east, her inundated town, a yard of putrid water standing in the Internet café, in the old hotel, in Ribeiro’s restaurant, the ruination general now. The memorial fountain in the square half-submerged but still, with pointless bravery, shooting a streamer of water up through the deluge. Silver piranhas cascading into the small colonial cathedral, the newer graves threatening to leach open in the churchyard. Shirtless men in rowboats navigating new waterways. Produce streaming from the greengrocer’s: passionfruit and collards and bruised papaya carried off by the current. An uprooted palm fanning its panicked fingers as it passes. Even from her perch she can hear the roar of the water.

On the roof of the workers’ quarters behind the hotel, families have rigged tarps and lean-tos, settling in, the women cooking drowned chickens and a monkey on a makeshift brazier.

She’s seen enough. Cradling her belly from below, she crosses to where Xoque sits on the treehouse floor smoking, his yellow eyes half-lidded, his smooth chest shining with perspiration. Maeve lowers herself carefully to the cool bamboo planks and leans back between his raised knees, settling against his body, his cigarette smoke suspended above. Without a word Xoque shapes a broad palm to her huge belly as if to comfort the child within. Eventually Maeve falls into a dreamless sleep, the emptiness blessed and oceanic, while above them the rain sways in curtains tall as the coastal mountains, shimmering in the contrary sunlight, heavy with life.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2014, EDWARD M. HAMLIN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE MISSOURI REVIEW

FINALIST FOR THE JEFFREY E. SMITH EDITORS’ PRIZE AND THE NARRATIVE STORY AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT PRIZE

Haddad: A Requiem

“Have you ever noticed,” Tony Haddad asked me as we strolled near his flat, “how walking behind a man with a missing leg focuses the mind?”

It was just the sort of thing he’d say back then, in the weeks before he died: wry and ironic and utterly true, economical as a scalpel cut. The disease had honed him. There was never a miscue, never a wasted word. He spoke canonically, because he knew. The nearness of death made Tony Haddad dangerously honest.

And: “I became truly a man, Sam, only when I admitted to myself that sex was for other people. Thank God I was given a daughter before I realized it.”

I envied my colleague and dear friend—not for the ALS that was consuming him, of course, but for how it freed him to speak so directly. It had always been hard for me to get that kind of honesty right. I’d touched on it perhaps a dozen times in my fifty-two years, with women I’d loved, with old friends, now and then with strangers on airplanes or trains. For Tony it had become second nature. Knowing that the disease would soon rob him of his voice, my friend meted out his words like a starving man counting out grains of rice, one by one.

In happier times Tony Haddad’s conversation had been loose and free, generous, ripe with sly humor and innuendo and digression, never stinting. His best jokes, and he had many excellent jokes, were those made at his own expense. A vast, untrammeled soul resided within that compact body, belied by the tidy sweater vest and dated grey suit, the impeccable nails and pencil moustache, the readers on a chain around his neck. So to hear him as he was in those final weeks, strict and concise as a village priest, was galvanizing. If I took the Eurostar up from Paris to Leiden every Saturday to see him, it wasn’t only because I knew he’d soon be gone. His immense clarity held me captive.

In the matter of one-legged men, for example, Tony was exactly right. We’d been walking along the medieval canal for nearly an hour, through the damp dusk and into the chilly night, my friend swaddled in a green cashmere blanket against the October chill. I pushed Tony’s chair as smoothly as I could across the gravel, but a soaking rain the night before made it rough going in places. I was afraid of catching a wheel in a rut and toppling my fragile cargo. Spotting a paved section on the other side of the canal, I made for a footbridge and we crossed quickly over the drab sluggish water, glad to put the boggy stretch behind us.

We’d just turned onto the smooth pavement when a man appeared from nowhere, his heaving gait the telltale sign of a false leg. The man fell in ahead of us and began laboring toward a nearby bandshell, every step a travail. I slowed the chair instinctively. Tony and I stopped talking, leaving a friendly disagreement about his daughter, Elise, hanging in the air. It was almost as if the one-legged man had turned and called out to us. At the bandshell he stopped to catch his breath, then fumbled in his overcoat for a cigarette and leaned back against a balustrade to smoke it.

I stopped pushing Tony’s chair. My friend took a pull of oxygen and said something I couldn’t make out. The disease slurred his speech miserably, and lately it had been much worse. But though speaking exhausted him, Tony Haddad wouldn’t be silenced. He slowed down; enunciated; labored through it. Apologized, as if he were at fault.

When I leaned down, he said: “Recognize the coat? Look how he holds his cigarette. You know him.”

It took a moment for it to register, but then I saw it clearly. Not ten yards ahead was Milan Visser, the notorious thug who’d once tried to destroy my friend—a cocky jackbooter from the violent fringe of the anti-Islamic movement, the sort who staved in the heads of Arab immigrants, even if, like Anthony Haddad, they’d been raised Catholic. Now he was here before us, shambling along the canal, stopping for a solitary cigarette. He cut a lonely figure in the dusk.

I was surprised to see Visser there. I assumed he still lived in Amsterdam, where he’d made his name terrorizing Turkish boys and Moroccan grocers and Lebanese businessmen. What was he doing here? Leiden was a university town, hardly fertile ground for his sort of paranoia.

“Visser,” I said to Tony, feeling the sudden need for a cigarette I didn’t possess.

“He’s living in the Joulestraat with a boy. We’re nearly neighbors. He enjoys this walk too.”

“But you keep your distance,” I said warily.

“Why should I? Life has thrust us together.”

“Tony! The man’s a killer.”

“Which interests me. I’ve never known a killer, have you?” He took another pull of oxygen; the machine clacked. Phlegm mustered in his throat. “Let’s go.”

I began pivoting the chair in the direction of his flat, but he nodded toward Visser. “No. There. Go.” When I hesitated, he scolded me: “Sam, there are things you don’t understand.”

I controlled the chair. I could have turned us around and left Visser far behind. But my respect for Tony Haddad didn’t permit it. And so we crept forward, stealing up on the man who’d done his level best, not long before, to terrorize my friend.

Visser had come to public notice when he was arrested for slitting the throat of a Turkish teenager in an Amsterdam alley. He contended that the boy had tried to rob him at knife point: he was merely defending himself from a “virus.” But the boy was half his size and autistic, likely incapable of such an organized assault; the hunting knife was Visser’s, moreover, and had been used from behind. Outrageously, the court acquitted him—a travesty in which many saw the long arm of the anti-immigrant bloc. A message was sent.

Soon Visser was all over television, his vitriol making him an irresistible guest. He wouldn’t apologize for despising Islam—of course not—because the Arab invasion was poisoning Christian society to the core. At least he was man enough to say it out loud. The rot was everywhere. Good Dutch kids were leaving the country every day to join ISIS—another fact the government didn’t want you to know. What if your own Markus or Pim ran off to become a jihadi? What if your Hannie or Liv were raped by some Yusef or Abdullah? It was time to put a stop to it for once and for all, Visser would declare, arching his back defiantly, his color high. On television, he fit the role almost comically: the shaved head, the virulent grey eyes, the crude race-baiting. And of course his signature accessory, the authentic SS trenchcoat—the same one Tony and I would see before us as we strolled the canal on that Leiden evening.

When the media began to lose interest in Visser, he turned his scorn upon Professor Anthony Haddad. Visser needed to gin up a new scandal to keep himself in the news, and in Tony—this cultured, endlessly congenial professor who also happened, somewhat inconveniently for his antagonist, to be a committed Catholic—he found his improbable target.

My friend’s particular offense had been to write a guest column in De Volkskrant mourning the destruction of antiquities in the ancient Syrian town of Palmyra. This tragedy touched Tony on many levels at once. Like me, he was a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology, but unlike me he was also a native son, damned to watch from afar as his country set itself ablaze. In the summer of 2015 he’d somehow managed to go back, to slip into Palmyra at immense personal risk and see for himself the heart-rending state of things. This was only days before ISIS would blow up the Temple of Baal and execute his old professor, Khaled al-Asaad, for refusing to reveal where he’d hidden certain artifacts he couldn’t bear to see destroyed. Tony had stayed at al-Asaad’s home during his visit, had eaten at his table and reminisced with him for hours, never guessing how brutally his elderly teacher’s life would soon end.

They were terrible days, so frightening that Tony’s daughter sought me out, after three years in which not a word had passed between us. “Sam!” Elise’s panicked phone message said. “Don’t you dare refuse to call me back. This isn’t about us.” Beneath the sharp tone I detected a vein of radioactive anxiety. Her self-assurance, always so reliable, was decaying fast, throwing off a dangerous energy. I called her back and she sobbed helplessly, profoundly afraid for her poppa.

Tony had concealed his plans from both of us. He’d said he was holing up at a place he kept on Crete, going to ground so he could start a new book. This was his ritual and we believed him, until Elise got a call from the Istanbul airport. Ashamed at having lied to her, he could no longer keep up the charade. In the few minutes they had, she’d been unable to talk him out of continuing on to Damascus; neither words nor tears could sway him. What he proposed to do was unthinkable. To slip into Syria while ISIS was on a rampage…utterly crazy. We were furious with him.

Elise and I had been a failure as lovers, but with her father in the war zone we needed each other. She’d been house-sitting in Amsterdam to be close to him, so I went up and we talked for hours in a restaurant along the Bloemgracht. “He’s not equipped for life in the real world,” she said. “Don’t let him fool you.” I knew she was right. For all his cosmopolitan air, Tony lacked common sense; he was a sentimentalist. He’d gone to visit his homeland the way he’d have visited an old friend on his deathbed—and I believe that’s just how he saw it. Elise and I doubted he understood the raw danger he was about to face.

By the grace of God Tony made it home. After collecting him at Schiphol we fed him dinner at Elise’s, lamb and Ciney, and he spoke barely a word the entire evening. He was in profound shock—who wouldn’t be? Words couldn’t describe what he’d seen. And all this was before the murder of his friend Khaled. That blow was yet to come.

We gave Tony space that evening. We didn’t press him. For some time we talked of Elise’s latest triumph, a life-sized bronze Proust she’d shipped to Paris for installation at the Ritz. I told a long story from my student days, I don’t recall which. The meal labored on. It was hard to tell whether Tony even heard us. When Elise went to make coffee he abruptly rose to go, as if a taxi had honked outside. After putting him on the Leiden train I went back to Elise’s and we tried to make love, craving that release, but the ghost of her father’s pain lingered in the flat, defeating us.

“This is exactly how he was after the accident,” she said, nestled in the crook of my arm. “Inconsolable.”

I knew only the barest outline of that event. Long before we met, Tony Haddad had rounded a corner in his car on a narrow Amsterdam street and run down a man and his son on their bicycles, killing the boy and gravely wounding the father, who was pinned under a tire. The riders had plunged right into the driver’s path. Had it not been Tony, it would have been someone else, but this didn’t stop Tony from taking the blame upon himself. Poisoned by remorse, he went into deep seclusion, refusing all attempts at comfort and eventually withdrawing to Crete where he dropped ten pounds, weight he couldn’t afford to lose. His collapse terrified Elise, who’d already lost her mother to leukemia and was just striking out on her own in the world. She became fiercely protective of her father.

And now Tony Haddad was consumed in mourning again—this time for an entire civilization.

A month after his return from Syria, Tony would read in the newspaper of his old professor’s barbaric death—beheaded by ISIS at age eighty-two and hung from a Roman column, a martyr for love. Khaled’s beloved, like Tony’s, was Syria, whose beautiful body had been defiled before his eyes.

Upon hearing the horrifying news, my friend abandoned his teaching duties and refused to see anyone. Neither Elise nor I could reach him. When she went to his flat, the neighbor said he’d been gone for a week. Perhaps he was at his place on Crete, but since there was no telephone service there we had no ready way to confirm it. I imagined him lost in the sort of depression that ends in a reckoning of the worst kind. Elise and I were plotting a trip down there when he suddenly resurfaced, calling her to ask if she knew how to get an article into the newspaper. Didn’t she have a journalist friend?

While in seclusion he’d drafted two essays, cries of the heart for his beloved Syria. The first, a bitter elegy for five priceless Syrian antiquities destroyed by ISIS, was taken immediately by De Volkskrant. The writing was so passionate, the topic so perfectly of the moment, that other newspapers quickly reprinted it. In France, Libération; in Munich, the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Timeran it in their international edition.

The second article was his loving testament to Khaled al-Asaad, cast as a colloquy between teacher and student. Think Plato, immediately after the death of Socrates—the grievous anguish, the veneration. The article was white hot. Tony poured his soul into it, and when it hit the papers his phone rang with interview requests, which he ignored. What was the point? Anything he’d say on television could only diminish what he’d written. His writing was a wail of pain. It spoke for itself.

It would be barely a week before Milan Visser appeared on a right-wing radio show to denounce Anthony Haddad as the leader of a terrorist cell. Bits of the ugly interview were replayed on the Dutch news, and Elise called me in a fury. According to Visser, Tony’s articles were only a smokescreen to divert attention from the author’s true mission, which was to recruit jihadis from the universities. By making a show of attacking ISIS, Visser claimed, Haddad was actually positioning himself to do its bidding. Who’d ever suspect an archaeology professor of betraying his adopted country? A perfect cover! Haddad should be jailed immediately, for the safety of the homeland….

Visser’s diatribe was covered even in France, where the anti-immigrant wave was constantly in the news. I switched on television and there was his brutal face, a translation of the Dutch radio interview playing as voiceover. It was unspeakable. I called Elise and convinced her that Visser’s taunts shouldn’t go unanswered. In a rage I drafted a short statement in defense of Tony and sent it straight to De Volkskrant, which printed it the very next morning.

Perhaps my words had some small impact, or perhaps the coming elections just knocked Visser out of the news. Whatever the case, the coverage stopped, only to give way to more intimate threats. First came an anonymous email threatening to behead Tony; attached was a grisly photo of al-Asaad’s headless corpse. Then an emailed photo of viscera turned out onto pavement, and a string of others just as alarming. Panicked, Tony had forwarded the first email to Elise, but only the first. I discovered all of them after his death, printed and tidily filed under Correspondence, my heart breaking at how he’d tried to make sense of their cruelty, to make a place for it in the taxonomy of his life.

Soon came a parcel with a blood-smeared Koran, then late-night phone calls threatening to rape Elise. It may have been Visser on the telephone, or not; it hardly mattered. Rather than call the police, Tony shifted an armoire so it blocked the balcony doors and covered the windows with newspaper. He no longer answered the phone, no longer answered email. When Elise and I pleaded with him to open the door, he begged to be left alone. He seemed to be in the midst of a full-on breakdown. We were beside ourselves with worry, but didn’t know what to do.

Only when someone sent a clumsily doctored photo of Professor Haddad to the University president—one that purported to show Tony in flagrante delicto with a girl of nine or ten—did the police take notice. Not because they thought the botched photo genuine, but because they hoped it might lead them to Tony’s tormentors. Though they made no arrests, the harassment abruptly stopped, and gradually my friend began to emerge from hiding, gently coaxed by his daughter and me. The trip to Syria, the loss of al-Asaad, and now this slander—Elise and I wondered if he’d ever recover.

Not long afterward, on an ordinary Thursday, he called Elise to say that he was under evaluation at the University’s neurology department.

While in Syria, the muscles of his forearms and calves had begun to quiver oddly. He’d attributed it, quite reasonably, to anxiety. After the murder of al-Asaad, a weakness began to steal up his limbs; he called it grief. But when he found himself nearly incapable of climbing the stairs to his flat, he realized there was something medically wrong. Within weeks he could no longer pull pants over his legs. He couldn’t begin to manage zippers or buttons. It must have been even more frightening than Visser’s attacks.

A year later—on the very evening when he and I encountered his old adversary by the bandshell—he’d tell me that ALS was like being pinned in a sunken ship, the water rising around you, the outcome inevitable. “Sam,” he said, “in Syria we say: Birth is the messenger of death. The message has come, and it’s addressed to me.”

In person, Milan Visser had the look many celebrities do when off the air: vaguely disappointed and therefore disappointing, depleted somehow, wan as children stuck inside on a rainy day.

He was shorter than he’d seemed on television. As we rolled toward him he turned abruptly—no easy thing for a one-legged man—and I noticed that his signature trenchcoat was six inches too long. My eyes were level with the top of the famously shaved head, which without benefit of television makeup was scabbed and dull. As we came to a halt before him he tossed his cigarette away and slumped forward, all his bravado gone. He was no more than half the man I’d imagined. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him, despite all he’d done.

When Visser registered Tony’s presence he nodded soberly and said something in Dutch, a language I barely understand. Tony replied in his hoarse voice, articulating the words painfully, struggling with the gutturals. I heard no anger in his reply, whatever it was he said. The two adversaries faced off rather formally, like gentlemen arriving for a duel. From Visser’s manner you’d never have guessed what a goon he was.

Now they were talking in earnest, Visser leaning in precariously on his good leg, hands clasping his knee. Still I understood nothing of the conversation. But I was watching more than listening, anyway, for it had occurred to me that Visser might try to harm Tony. The stubby hands looked powerful. But they stayed where they belonged, Visser cocking his head thoughtfully at something Tony said. I wondered, fleetingly, if the whole storm trooper thing was a ruse, whether the man was actually intelligent, even educated, but just as quickly dismissed the thought. He’d murdered an autistic boy. What more proof did I need?

And then, suddenly, the encounter was over. Visser stood up, nodded at Tony and turned onto a side path that led away from the canal, slumped shoulders reeling with every difficult step.

“What was that all about?” I asked my friend as I wheeled him home.

“Nothing important.”

“Everything between you two is important.”

“Visser and I have reached an understanding, Sam.” In an offhand way he added: “We see each other now and then.”

“What are you saying?”

He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “Sam, can you speed it up? I’ve filled my diaper, damn it.” An eruption of phlegm set him coughing. “The dying body speaks in metaphor,” he managed, smiling crookedly.

I sped him home and handed him off to his homecare aide, a Palestinian student named Ali. With exceeding care Ali pushed the chair into the bathroom and dealt with the mess while I waited in the ill-lit front room. If I were dying, I thought, I’d want nothing but bright light around me…why did Haddad choose to live in perpetual twilight?

The flat had been adapted to his new reality. The swing-out desk for his wheelchair; the oversized computer keyboard designed for use with a mouth stick; the bookshelves stocked with diapers and wipes. An oxygen tank in the corner. A portable commode. In the kitchen I glimpsed a blender, essential equipment now that he could no longer manage solid food. Apparently Ali was a wizard with it, his latest creation being a revolting purée of Tony’s beloved nasi goreng. I felt my throat thicken with anguish…what had Tony Haddad done to deserve this?

But there were still signs of his old life. On the wall were etchings of Palmyra and the Temple of Baal. A photo of Elise as a girl, sitting on the steps of Carnegie Hall during Tony’s year at Columbia. And beside the French doors, lugged inside for winter, Tony’s beloved fig tree, whose marvelous fruit Elise had once plucked and fed to me. She’d worn a defiant crimson streak in her hair back then. With her amber skin and keen mind she’d been irresistible to me—she still was, in many ways. There was a reason we’d tried again and again to make it work.

My friend wheeled himself back into the room in striped pajamas, looking greatly relieved, while Ali ran a bath. There was something in his gaze that hadn’t been there before, a sort of resolve. I couldn’t quite read him.

“Sam, listen,” he said, “will you stay the night in town? Come back for breakfast? As a favor to me?”

He’d never made such a request. “Of course. Why?”

He looked away, tracking Ali through the bathroom door. “It will be important for you to be here, I think.”

I thought of Visser: was Tony staging some kind of meeting? But I sensed this wasn’t it. “You’re being obscure,” I chided him.

A labored smile crossed his lips. “Comme il faut.”

I recall being struck by how placid he seemed, once I’d agreed to come. It was the same way he’d been with Visser, an hour before; Visser too had seemed to calm him. I couldn’t account for it—until, that is, I thought I could.

“Tony,” I said, “you’ve forgiven Visser, haven’t you?”

“Forgiveness is one of the few pleasures I have left, Sam.”

“What he did to you was unforgiveable! Particularly the photo of the child.“

“Nothing is unforgiveable. Nothing. Besides, it wasn’t as unfair as you think.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Tony studied my chair leg, abstracted. “Look,” he said with a rasp, “I don’t have time to worry about others being fair to me. What matters is being fair to others.”

I saw Ali slip into the kitchen and open the refrigerator, sending an appraising look Tony’s way. A moment later he reappeared with some runny gelatine and a bib. “Fluids, Professor,” he said gently, and helped Tony take a few sips. It seemed to go down smoothly at first, but then Tony started coughing severely, frighteningly. Unfazed, Ali moved behind him and lifted his flaccid arms high until it stopped. Tony had spat up on his clean bib, which seemed to disgust him. Those few seconds brought home to me how little time my friend had left. His mind was as sharp as ever, but there was no denying that death was bearing down. I felt tears well in my eyes and turned to daub them away, not wanting to upset him further. Tony was exhausted.

“I need to let you get to bed,” I said, standing. “What time do you want me here in the morning?”

“Not a minute later than seven.”

I had the urge to kiss him on the lips, as Arab men do, though it wasn’t something we’d ever done.

“Sam, don’t go just yet,” Tony said, surprising me. “Sit.”

I pulled a chair up next to him and took his birdlike hand in mine.

“You know how this ends, don’t you?” he said.

“I’m afraid I do.”

I’d read up on ALS, of course. I did know how it ended: with paralysis of the diaphragm. What began as a quiver of the muscles would end in excruciating suffocation. It generally took a year or two to reach that point. It had been fourteen months since Tony’s first symptoms appeared.

I squeezed his hand carefully. “I’m so sorry, Tony.”

He nodded—the simplest of gestures, one he’d soon be unable to manage.

I went on, fumbling for words, hating myself for not finding the right ones. “Do you ever have…you know…thoughts of getting out ahead of it?”

He knew exactly what I meant, despite my clumsy way of putting it.

“Out of the question for a believing Catholic, unfortunately.”

“But if it’s done medically? It wouldn’t be—”

“Suicide? Close enough. The patient needs to take affirmative steps. Multiple steps, over time. So much Dutch bureaucracy. The Church has a position, of course.”

“I thought the Church believed in mercy.”

“A merciful God, yes. Which isn’t the same thing at all.” Tony met my eyes calmly. “Sam, know that I’m at peace with what’s going to happen. Do you believe me?”

I couldn’t answer him. Instead I rose, kissed my old friend and went outside, where I was finally, gratefully, able to cry. I realized that I loved Tony Haddad as I’d never loved anyone before—not even Elise, whose father’s decline, I realized, had brought closer to my heart than ever.

I spent a sleepless night at a hotel near the station. To get the blood flowing in the morning I jogged back to Tony’s in the sun, hating the loveliness of the water below. There were sirens about, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I was determined to be there for my friend, to be present in every way, no matter how exhausted I felt.

It was farther than I thought, and I arrived a few minutes late. As I rounded the final corner, the reason for the sirens became clear: several police cars and an ambulance had jammed into Tony’s narrow street. Policemen warned gawkers away, radios chattering, the press arriving. Ali sat on a stoop sobbing, a policewoman bent over him. I felt my chest go hollow, because I knew exactly what the commotion meant. I could only watch, unable to take another step forward, the morning shattered.

I did wonder about the show of force. Why so many police?

“Visser,” Elise would explain a few hours later. She’d taken a taxi down from Amsterdam immediately after getting the call. The police had let her through immediately. She was the daughter. I was no one.

Once they’d taken Tony away, we walked through town under a blinding sun and climbed the steps to the ancient, ruined keep at the confluence of the old and new Rhines. Elise had details to attend to, but none was more important, she said, than being with me. She smiled; we kissed, and leaned over the parapet overlooking the city.

She seemed at peace, but I wasn’t. There might be solace in knowing that Tony’s suffering was over, but it mattered profoundly how the end had come. I needed to know that he hadn’t suffocated to death. But how could I ask his daughter such a question?

Elise had another topic in mind. “Visser’s why there were so many police.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Ali found my poppa in his bed, in his favorite pajamas, with the family Bible beside him…Sam, he was serene. He didn’t suffer. The autopsy will say what the specific drug was, but he’d been put to sleep, I’m sure of it. By Milan Visser.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know how Visser lost his leg?”

“No idea.”

“Remember my father’s accident? With the bicyclists, the father and son? The son killed, the father pinned under the car?”

Of course I remembered—the rough sketch of it, anyway. Then it struck me: “That was Visser’sson, wasn’t it…and Visser’s leg. Why didn’t you tell me, when all this trouble broke out?”

“Poppa made me promise not to. He didn’t want you to know, Sam. That accident was his greatest shame. And…” She paused. “I think my poppa and Visser may have made a pact. Especially given how they found Visser.”

“And how was that?”

“Ali arrived early for work and found the door unlocked, then found my father. Imagine, Sam…he loved my poppa, who treated him like a son. Poor boy.”

“But Visser?”

“At some point Ali opened the linen closet and there he was, hanging from a wire. I saw it myself. He’d killed himself in the most brutal way possible—slowly suffocated, almost decapitated. Killed himself punitively. Visser sent my father off with such delicacy and kindness, then did that to himself.” She shook her head in disbelief. “What self-hatred.”

I was even more confused. “If you’re Tony Haddad, why have Visser do this? Of all people?”

“My father never forgave himself for killing Visser’s son. It was the central struggle of his life, Sam. In letting Visser kill him he must have felt a kind of moral symmetry. And sidestepped suicide, or convinced himself that he had. All he did was leave the door unlocked.”

Fragments were coming back, things Tony had said: Visser and I have reached an understanding. And: I’m at peace with what’s going to happen. Now I understood. He and Visser must have agreed in the park, the evening before, that it was time. When Tony asked me to come back at seven the next morning, he perhaps hoped I’d intercept Ali. But I was late, and Ali arrived before me—his misfortune—only to stumble onto the terrible scene.

“I’ve got to go,” I told Elise. I needed to be alone. Something in me was slipping, something collapsing. I turned away, the Rhine catching the sun beneath our ancient tower, the day marching on relentlessly.

“Stay, Sam,” she said. She wrapped her arms around me from behind. “You know what he wanted for us, don’t you?”

“Elise,” I said, but could say no more. When I tried to pull away she only held me closer. We stood there in silence for an eternity, my old lover and I, her breath warm against my neck, the smell of old stone rising from the battlements as it must have risen, in better days, from Tony Haddad’s beloved ruins.

COPYRIGHT © 2019, EDWARD HAMLIN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

WINNER, 2020 NELSON ALGREN AWARD

PUBLISHED IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, JUNE 19, 2020

Back to top