Heil
Scenes from a Novel by Arlene Sanders
The Blue Ridge Mountains crazed the horizon with fast and forward scrolls,
as if the finger paints of a small child had swirled them into place. A pale sun calmed
the peaks and dappled points of light across the Thornton River, where a young
boy—twelve, perhaps—reeled in the creature that curved his pole nearly in half. A
bluegill? Even a large bass?
The meeting would convene in the evening, leaving him now with time to fish and
reflect. He was excited about it—the meeting—now that he was, for the first time,
old enough to attend.
Convene.
He liked that word. It made the meeting sound important. Which it was.
The boy was one of the underlings.
* * *
A gunship—I’m sorry, but you need to know certain things—is a heavily armed
helicopter, but maybe you already know that. A Cobra is a high-speed gunship. An
M-16 is a rifle, and an M-60 is a machine gun. These are not modern aircraft or
weaponry, but relics from a war in the distant past—the American War, fought in
North and South Vietnam. The Huns, unlike any other soldiers before or after them,
refused to castrate their stallions, which meant that their cavalries were the only ones
in history that included no mares. A reticulated python is a nonvenomous (not
poisonous) constrictor reptile that kills its prey by squeezing it to death. The snake
coils around its victim. Each time the victim exhales, the coils tighten, leaving a
reduced lung capacity for the victim’s next breath. In the dank, humid jungles of
Southeast Asia, a full-grown female reticulated python may reach three-hundred
pounds and thirty feet in length. The males are smaller, but equally dangerous. Unlike
the gunship, the M-16, and the M-60, the reticulated python is not outdated. The
snake is the same as it’s always been and is not likely to change soon, if ever. The
snake—like war—is what it is.
* * *
His back was long, and he wore a cotton T-shirt, rumpled, the color of sand.
He was a white boy, hunched over the piano, an upright, old and slightly off-key.
He played “Sister” in a heartfelt, low fandango. The light was dim and blue, the bar
streaked with plumes of smoke, soft as velvet.
I came up behind him quietly and placed my hands against his ribs, one hand on
each side. The music didn’t miss a beat.
I closed my eyes. From his ribs, and the gentle spaces between them, the current
zinged through my hands, up my arms, firing and tingling into my chest, down to my
toes, and back into my finger tips—current white hot, alive, and firing every fiber of
my being.
This is what electricity is, I thought. This is how it feels.
That’s how it began.
He taught me everything I know. How to travel, how to trace huge sums of money
through a myriad of bank accounts, how to play the piano, and how to make love like
love was meant to be made. By that, I mean he liked it rough, just as I did.
Our best time was in Québec. It had been a hot July—a hundred and ten in the city
that day—and we headed for a cool, boreal woodland by the St. Lawrence River.
We took guns. I hunt with a .410, because it’s light and I am only a woman. We
wore, implausibly in July, camouflage fatigues, our faces covered with war paint. We
laid our guns on the grass and began on the riverbank, rolled down into water twelve
feet deep, and finished there. He climbed back to the top of the bank and slept in the
sun, and I remained in the river, naked and floating on my back, nearly lulled to sleep
in a soft, warm rain.
We sailed to the Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, east of Québec,
and anchored in a cranny among the cliffs. We watched baby seals and whales at
play, the whales gleaming silver in the sun, lofting and curving into white-capped
waves, like spoons of children dipping into bright blue bowls of ice cream.
Later, we went back to collect the guns, but couldn’t find them. We searched in the
marshy grass, but the guns had washed into the river, carried away by swift currents.
The guns were gone.
We returned to the truck, happy and content. There were other times, of course,
but I think that was our best time.
So far as I know, I was the only underling ever to fall in love—I mean, genuinely
in love—with a ruler. He never married, as many of the rulers didn’t, but I never knew
of any other woman for him. I loved him all the way through to the end.
* * *
Dainty and shriveled, the old woman bent across her needlepoint and continued
to stitch an enormous battle scene in shades of sepia, russet, bronze and steel for
the bows and arrows, pure white for the horses, and deep scarlet for the blood.
Celie was eighty-nine. She had been, in her youth, an accomplished horsewoman
and a good shot. The underlings retained Celie not because of sympathy for her age
or compassion for her frailty, but because she had the highest I.Q. in the group and
because she could, on a cloudy day, fire into the bull’s eye of a target fifty yards
from the barrel of her Smith and Wesson Beretta 92fs, with or without its silencer.
* * *
Celie did not live in Lichtenstein, although she was born there. Her father had been
a diplomat, a famous one, and he was one of the few, outside of the elite, who knew
that Japan would destroy Pearl Harbor on Thanksgiving Day. When Ambassador
Boynton was assassinated, in November of 1941, the thugs spared her life because
she was so beautiful—Celie was sixteen—that the killers thought the ruler who had
ordered the assassination—Jimmy Cranston, in Tokyo—might want to have a go at
her before they finished her off.
He did.
Cranston admired her beauty when his henchmen brought her in. He instructed the
men to leave, then asked Celie to join him for coffee in the suite beside his bedroom.
“My brothers are stationed at Pearl Harbor,” she said immediately. “Both of them.”
To Cranston’s astonishment, Celie spoke in Japanese. He rang for his lieutenant.
The soldier stood at attention while Cranston barked orders for the immediate
removal of the Boynton boys from Pearl Harbor.
“Bring them here,” Cranston said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Get Hirohito over here at once. I want Nagumo and Fuchida here, too. Tell them
the attack on Pearl is to be delayed until December."
“Yes, sir.”
When Cranston abruptly switched to French, Celie didn’t miss a beat.
“How many languages do you speak?” he asked.
“Seven.”
“Which ones?”
“Japanese, French, Spanish, English, German, Italian and Portuguese.”
“And your brothers?” he asked.
“They know the same seven,” she said.
“Do you think you could learn Chinese?”
“Of course.”
* * *
Celie and her brothers remained in Cranston’s employ until the Japanese ruler
died. The siblings continued to serve his successor. They mastered twenty-seven
languages among them and were the most valuable assets the Japanese had until the
events of 2014.
* * *
After the death of her husband, from natural causes, Martha amazed all of the
rulers by emerging as one of them. Dowdy in appearance and retiring in manner, she
had languished in the shadow of her brilliant Vietnamese husband from the day of
their marriage, and she had pleased him in every way, because Hung despised
women who were the least bit forward in their behavior. Women are to be seen and
not heard, Hung had insisted, and Martha had never disappointed him.
When Hung died, Martha’s immediate response was to have Madame Chanel
flown to Kien Gang from the designer’s apartment in Paris to discuss the widow’s
new wardrobe. Only then did Martha begin to make the funeral arrangements. The
House of Chanel labored over the new garments—nearly all of them in blazing, jewel
tones of scarlet and crimson—even as the dead husband lay in state, and Martha
summoned all of the discipline she had to force herself to wear white (traditional for
funerals in Vietnam, rather than black) to the funeral service.
Whereupon she returned to the palace, flung her funeral clothes into the hall
outside her bedroom, and slipped on Western Levis that Hung had never seen,
along with a hot pink overblouse, the V-neck of which plunged all the way down to
the navel of the beautiful widow.
* * *
Girard pressed the button at the top of the brass panel. When the door opened,
I did a double take. The elevator opened directly inside a living room.
“Girard, I’m going to fix Mademoiselle a drink," Joey said. "Please ask the guys to
take her things to the east room, all of them.”
“Oui, Monsieur.” The elevator disappeared.
“Is there any place for me to fix myself up a little before I meet him?” I asked.
“Meet who?”
“Your boss.”
“Oh.”
“Joey?”
“Well, I’m. . .self-employed, I guess you’d say,” Joey said.
I looked around. Except for an enormous, deep red Persian carpet, the room was
plain and sparsely furnished. But the furnishings were antique, and most of the
pieces I recognized as Jacobean, which meant four-hundred years old.
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
“I live here with you,” he said.
I walked to the window and gasped at the glorious view of the Saint Lawrence.
“This is your apartment? Is it a one-bedroom?” I didn’t see a studio couch in the
living room. I just couldn’t take it all in.
“We have the floor,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“We have the eighteenth floor. It’s the top floor,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Louise. . .I own the Château Frontenac,” he said.
“What?”
* * *
The U.S. invaded Iraq for one reason, and that reason was oil. The specifics of
the plan were not known, or even apparent, to all of the rulers. The truth was that
Rodriguez, who had rarely left Bogotá, who spoke only Spanish, and who knew
nothing about the Arabs, had instigated the invasion against the better judgment of
every single American in a position of political leadership—including Bush himself.
Rodriguez was determined to cash in on the assets of nations whose ability to
accomplish anything collectively was roughly akin to that of South America. The
Rodriguez cartel controlled Bush, and what Rodriguez wanted—Rodriguez got.
As thousands of soldiers lost their lives in Iraq—for what reason neither the boys
nor their families knew—the Arabs and the Americans sank deeper and deeper into
their common quagmire, while Rodriguez puzzled over the lack of any discernible
payoff.
As if Iraq were the only oil nation—it wasn’t even the major one—and as if a four-
year-old couldn’t figure out what was bound to happen next.
* * *
Cortez rang for Kelly.
“Sir?” she said.
“Get me a plane out of Bogotá as quickly as possible. Call Tokyo. I’m going to
Iraq, and I want that woman with me—what’s her name? She speaks all those
goddam languages.”
“Celie Boynton. What should I tell her?”
“You don’t tell her a goddam thing. I want her with me, and that’s all she needs to
know. If there’s any problem, get her boss on the line. Then pack for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And get me a sample, so I can see what it looks like. I’ve never seen it.”
“Never seen what, sir?”
“Oil.”
Heil, copyright 2008 by Arlene Sanders