Slightly dizzy from the bar scene, she crossed the avenue Marceau in a sea of Renaults, Simcas, wolf whistles. Up some side street. Stacked heels clicking, white butterfly stockings singing silk.
She took off the floppy white Easter bonnet. Tossed it over a slat fence into somebody's yard. She took off the uncomfortable high-heeled pumps and got into the black flats that were in her shoulder bag.
At avenue Montaigne, she met Damian. The two of them embraced for a long moment. Then the pretty young couple walked arm in arm across the murky, slow-moving Seine. Almost at once, they began to prepare to be double-crossed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The effect that we wanted most on San Dominica was helpless confusion. A feeling like darkness and light being turned on and off at our will. Things suddenly being dangerous that weren't supposed to be dangerous.... More important, there had to be no way to chart any of it. No known patterns.
The Rose Diary
Wylde's Fall, San Dominica
Between seven Sunday morning and the late afternoon, nothing happened on San Dominica that hadn't been happening for the previous thousand years or so. The more than 150 beaches were pearly white, striking, and perfect; the royal blue skies were clear and pure-a 1,000 percent improvement
on any metropolitan sky; the sunshine was uninterrupted.
And while nothing terrifying was happening, the Americans and Europeans still on the island had time to sit back and think about what had happened. Not least of all, the sixty-one members of the government assembly had time to consider their unlucky alternatives for the future.
At four in the afternoon, Colonel Dassie Dred stood on the verge of worldwide farne.
Looking down from the second highest and most beautiful waterfall in the Caribbean-Wylde's Falls-he could see a barefoot black boy and a white couple making the popular walking tour up the many-tiered water shoots.
The three people sloshed through the most beauti- ful, black, freshwater pools. they splashed together in cascading ten- and twenty-foot-high falls; occasionally shouted to one another over the crashing roar of the blue water; stopped once for a misty camera shot.
When the young guide finally turned the rocky corner beneath his hiding place, Dred extended his hand through a clump of bushes. The small boy allowed himself to be pulled up, leaving the white couple looking up at the leering face of the revolutionary. 'Yo' go home now,' Dred said to the boy. 'Nenm-iine be lookin' back.'
As he spoke, two of his men jumped through banana leaves into the bubbly pool below. One man came swinging a cane machete sideways like a baseball bat.
The long knife caught a screaming, @ishlooking woman across the front of her Town & Country summer blouse. The hard blow upended her in a clumsy three-point fall.
The second, stronger soldier brought his knife straight down. The woman's blond, bankerish-lookmg husband stood still for a moment, then he split from the shoulders down and toppled over Wylde's Falls.
Meanwhile, down at the park's entry gates, a handful of tourists and lounging guides were watching the day's final climbers make their way down the tricky falls. As they watched two couples and their guides climb down slowly, a body-a swimniing woman, it looked like-shot headfirst around a high curve in the swift water. The swimming woman disappeared again; then toppled over a smooth lip of the black rock; then caught sideways up against a jutting boulder shooting bubbly white water high in the air.
A man split like broken scissors came down next. The body made it around the jutting rock, bounced down several small falls, skinnned past the terrorstricken crowd at the gates, then disappeared without a sound into the sea. Colonel Dred had conducted his first official machete raid, and as it had been skillfully designed to be, it was the very best one so far. Dred was ready.
Trelawney, San Dominica
Sunday Evening.
A greasy dish of sticky brown rice sat in front of him. Gray shredded goat. Some shellfish that wasn't lobster, wasn't crab or shrimp, wasn't really edible' Peter Macdonald thought he saw a small black claw rise up and swim in the stew. He gobbled it UP. It was sixty cents for the meal and green teaa bargain. After his Sunday dinner, Macdonald sat in a dark rear corner of the native restaurant. He slowly smoked two cigarettes. He nervously pushed his hand back through his hair twenty or thirty times within five minutes or less. Sitting there all alone, Peter remembered a dumb movie he'd seen once. Some handsome blond actor had played a man who'd simply gone to The New York Times to get out of a pack of trouble. Gone to the Times the way people used to go to the police-and the next thing you knew, everything was copacetic. The man in the movie was safe and sound.
The screen credits rolled up over the man's frozen, sn-dling face. 'America the Beautiful' played. Everybody in the theater went home as happy as clams.
Idle speculations of a drowning man.
Because what exactly could he tell The New York Times? Peter had begun to speculate. What could he tell anybody, really? That he'd seen this tall blond Englishman-maybe an Englishman-in the vicinity of one of the San Dominica machete murders? That he'd held a State Department man's face to the burner of an electric stove, and the man had begun to scream about the Mafia?
Suddenly the restaurant's waitress and cook were standing over him. A small, moon-faced black girl, she'd been flitting all night around the main room like a trapped moth. Table... table... window. stove... table... window.
Nobody would let the modi-girl out, though... table.
' Yo' lak yo' lobster, yes, mahn?' Loose translation: You're crazy to eat in here. Let me outside, please. I'm a moth.
Peter smiled at the moth thought; at something in the young girl's eyes. 'Good food,' he said softly. 'Better than at the big hotels.'
