“Really? You were in prison?”
“A month shy of three years. Met some interesting people in there.”
“What was it like?”
“Sister, you don’t want to know.”
She said, in a thoughtful tone, “Saint Francis was in prison. . . .” Then glanced at Jack and asked, “But how do you feel about it? I mean committing crimes and then being locked up.”
“You do it and forget it.” He hadn’t heard about Saint Francis doing time. . . . But he was talking about himself now. “I have a healthy attitude about guilt. It’s not good for you.”
He saw her smile, not giving it much, but he smiled back at her, feeling a lot better, thinking maybe they should stop on the way, have a cup of coffee. She was nice, easy to talk to, and he was still a little hung over this Sunday afternoon. But when he mentioned coffee Sister Lucy frowned in a thoughtful kind of way and said they really didn’t have time.
Jack said, “I’ve found one thing in this business, there’s very little pressure. You go to pick up the deceased, and I don’t mean to sound disrespectful, but they’re gonna be there waiting.”
She said, “Oh,” in her quiet, unhurried way, her gaze lingering, “no one told you.”
Jack said, “I had a feeling there was something you thought I knew. What didn’t anyone tell me?”
She said, “I think you’re going to like it.”
He had to admit he liked the idea she was playing with him now, seeing a gleam in those calm eyes as she looked over again, about to let him in on a secret.
“The girl we’re going to get—”
“Amelita Sosa.”
“Yes. She isn’t dead.”
Seven years ago, when Amelita was fifteen or sixteen and living in Jinotega with her family, a National Guard colonel came along and put stars in her eyes. This guy, who was a personal friend of Somoza, told Amelita that with her looks and his connections she’d be sure to win the Miss Nicaragua pageant and after that the Miss Universe; appear on international satellite television and in no time at all become a famous film star. “You know, of course,” Sister Lucy said, “what he had in mind.” This was during the war. Before the Sandinistas took over the government.
Jack understood what the colonel was up to, but wasn’t exactly sure about the war. He knew they were always having revolutions down there and did understand there was one going on right now. He remembered when he was little his dad, back from Honduras for a few days, telling them the people down there were crazy, hot-tempered; if they weren’t fighting over a woman they were biting the hand that fed them. Jack would picture shifty-eyed guys with machetes, straw sombreros, bullet belts crossed over their shoulders, waiting to ambush a United Fruit train loaded with bananas. But then he would see Marlon Brando and a bunch of armed Mexican extras ride into the scene and government soldiers firing machine guns from the train. It was hard to keep the borders and the history down there straight. He didn’t want to interrupt Sister Lucy’s story and sound dumb asking questions. He listened and stored essential facts, picturing stock characters. The colonel, one of those oily fuckers with a gold cigarette case he opens to offer the poor son of a bitch he’s having shot just what he wants in these last moments of his life, a smoke. Amelita, Jack saw a demure little thing with frightened Bambi eyes, then had to enlarge her breasts and put her in spiked heels and a bathing suit cut high to her hips for the Miss Universe contest.
But once he got her to Managua the colonel never mentioned beauty pageants again. The only feeling he had for Amelita was lust. Good word, lust. Jack couldn’t recall if he’d ever used it, but had no trouble picturing the colonel, the son of a bitch, lusting. Jack put an extra fifty pounds on him for the bedroom scene: the colonel taking off his uniform full of medals, gut hanging out, leering at Amelita cowering behind the bed. Jack watched him rip open the front of her nightgown, show-class breasts springing free, as Sister Lucy said, “Are you listening?”
“To every word. And then what?”
And then, by the time the rebels had reached Managua, the colonel was in Miami and Amelita was back home, safe for the time being.
The next part brought the story close to the present but was harder to follow, Sister Lucy referring to the political situation down there like he knew what she was talking about. It was confusing because the ones that had been the government before, it sounded like, were now the rebels, the contras. The ones that had started the revolution back in the seventies were now running the country.
He got that much. But which were the good guys and which were the bad guys?
While he was still trying to figure it out Sister Lucy was telling how the colonel had now returned to Nicaragua as a guerrilla commandant in the north, came looking for Amelita in the dead of night and took her off with him into the mountains.
Say one thing for the colonel, he didn’t quit. “Maybe the guy really liked her,” Jack said, reserving judgment, still not sure which side the colonel was on, even taking off, briefly, the extra weight he’d put on the guy. And got a look from Sister Lucy; man, a hard stare. “Or he was driven by his consuming lust,” Jack said. “That would be more like it, huh? A lust that knew no bounds.”
She said, “Are you finished?” Sounding like Leo with that dry tone. He told her he was and she said, good. It was a new experience, the feeling he could say just about anything he wanted to a nun, of all people, and she’d get it because she was aware—he could see it in her eyes—and would not be shocked or offended. He had been to prison, but this lady had been to a war.
They came to the part where Amelita found out she had Hansen’s disease. It was while she was still in the mountains with the colonel. Brown spots began to appear on her arms and face. She was scared to death. A doctor in camp—“Listen to this, Jack”—made the diagnosis and told the colonel Amelita would have to go to Sagrada Familia immediately, that day, to begin sulfone treatments. There was no sensory loss, the disease would be arrested in an early stage, and the doctor was confident there would be no disfigurement.
Jack said, “It’s hard to imagine a good-looking young girl like that—”
Sister Lucy said, “Listen to me, will you?” It surprised him and shut him up. “Where do you think the doctor was from he could take one look at her and make the diagnosis? Yes, absolutely, even before he did a biopsy and saw M. leprae bacilli and confirmed it, she had near-tuberculoid HD. Jack, he was our doctor, from Sagrada Familia. One of the disappeared ones.”
There it was again.
“Well, he didn’t just disappear then.”
“Of course not. He was taken by force, guns pointed at his head. They kidnapped him.”
“Then why do you call it disappeared?”
She said, “My God, where have you been? It isn’t only in Nicaragua and Salvador, it’s a Latin American custom. It happens in Guatemala, it’s popular all the way south to Argentina. Don’t you read? People are taken from their homes, abducted, and they’re called desaparecidos, the disappeared. And when they’re found murdered, you know who did it? Los descomocidos, unknown assailants.”
Jack was shaking his head. “I’m not sure I ever heard about that.”
“Listen to me.” She snapped it at him. Then continued in her quiet tone. “The doctor, Rudolfo Meza, from our hospital, he told the colonel Amelita was in the early stages of leprosy. And you know what the colonel did? He drew a pistol and shot the doctor four times in the chest. Murdered him, standing close enough to touch him with the gun barrel. A witness told me, a contra woman who deserted a few days later and came to us. Amelita was there, of course. She saw it. . . .”
“I was gonna ask you.”
“And she ran. The contra woman helped her get to Jinotega, then came to the hospital to warn us, the colonel had sworn to kill Amelita. . . . And you think maybe the guy really liked her. Is that right, Jack?”
He sat there in his navy-blue suit and striped tie and couldn’t think of one goddamn thing to say back to
her. This lady was not as nice as she appeared; she could show you a hard edge. They had left the interstate and were approaching the river, past chemical works in the near distance, the sight and smell of them along the flats.
“He murdered the doctor for telling him. Then came to the hospital looking for Amelita. He said she had defiled him.” The sister’s tone hushed in the quiet of the air-conditioned hearse. “He said she had allowed him to enter her body in order to give him the disease and he would kill her for that reason, trying to make him a leper.”
4
* * *
THEY PASSED THROUGH the main gate and she came to life, telling him that at one time it was called the Louisiana Leper Home. Her tone relaxed again, natural. And now it was the National Hansen’s Disease Center. He knew that but kept quiet, still trying to imagine a man wanting to kill a girl he believed had tried to give him leprosy. Was that possible? She told him the administration building predated the Civil War, was once the mansion on a sugar plantation and all those mossy oak trees must be just as old.
He knew that, too.
Now that same girl, Amelita, was suppose to leave here in the hearse. They could have got a limo for the same price. So it must be somebody was watching. Or it was possible and they weren’t taking any chances. Make them think Amelita was dead. . . . But would the staff be in on it? How would they work it?
Meanwhile his tour guide was telling him it amazed her that the world’s most advanced training and research center for Hansen’s disease was in the United States. And how many people knew about it?
Well, just about everybody in New Orleans did. He’d heard stories that in the old days lepers were brought here in a train with the windows covered, nailed shut; the whole place guarded so they couldn’t get out and spread the disease. Somebody on his mother’s side of the family, her aunt’s father-in-law, had been brought here. . . .
She was saying now it reminded her of a small college campus. There, that view of the main buildings.
It looked to Jack Delaney like a federal correctional facility, minimum security, once you got past the older buildings that had that New Orleans look. The main buildings were all white three-story affairs laid out in rows and connected on all three floors by enclosed walkways that were like high walls with windows. The dormitories, the infirmary, the dining hall, the recreation building, all were connected by the walkways. Why was that? So nobody would see the lepers?
She told him the last time she was here there were about three hundred live-in patients.
The girl, he imagined, would be up on the top floor of the infirmary. If they were making this look real. That’s where the morgue was.
New patients would come for sulfone therapy and have to stay only about a month. But there were some who’d been here for years and years, afraid to leave. Some were disfigured, some had lost limbs and got around in wheelchairs. That’s why all the building levels were connected.
Oh.
Did he know there was a golf course? Yes, he did, and studied her calm expression, her smile as they passed a couple of sisters in white nurse uniforms. She waved . . .
While he sat here wired, trying to second-guess what was going on. Even a little annoyed. The sister giving him leper facts and the tour while a girl waited to be taken out in a hearse so a freaked-out Nicaraguan would think she was dead. That had to be it. Now she was waving to a guy in a lab coat . . .
And he thought, Yeah, but she got the girl out of Central America by herself under the gun and brought her all the way here, didn’t she? So leave her alone. Don’t rush her. She knows what she’s doing. Look at her, Jesus, with that movie-star nose and the lower lip he wouldn’t mind biting . . .
She looked at him just then and Jack said, “My mother’s Aunt Elodie was married to a guy, I never knew him, but his dad was here back in the thirties. He was a building contractor and got the disease, according to my mother’s aunt, from a colored fella that worked for him. She said he had a little cut on his hand, right here. I remember her telling me when I was little. She lived out Esplanade Avenue in a big frame house that was always dark inside. She kept the shades drawn during the day and it smelled old and musty. I picture her, I can smell that house. She believed that was the way you got leprosy, from a colored person. You had to be careful, she said, if you were around them and you had any cuts. I used to think about that old man, her father-in-law. . . . He died the same year I was born. I couldn’t imagine a well-to-do man like that, in New Orleans, having leprosy. Lepers were always natives in Africa or Asia. . . . There was a movie we saw in high school about a leper colony in Burma that I’ll never forget. When I think of lepers now I see those people. I mean they were in the worst shape you can imagine, really awful-looking. Some of ’em, I remember, didn’t have noses.” He paused a moment and said, “But what I remember most was this Italian missionary that ran the place. Guy with a full beard, real long, scraggly, wore a white cassock and a beret. But the thing about him, he was always touching the lepers, no matter how deformed they were. Like he was going out of his way to touch them. Taking hold of the stubs they had for hands, touching their faces . . .”
Jack paused again. They were on the tree-shaded drive that led to the infirmary building, Sister Lucy’s gaze on the entrance, directly ahead of them.
He said, “You touch them, too, don’t you? Not just the drunks at the soup kitchen, I mean lepers, at the hospital where you worked.”
She came to a stop and turned off the ignition before looking at him with those quietly aware eyes.
“That’s what you do, Jack, you touch people.”
They sat in the hearse parked in the shade of old oak trees while she smoked a cigarette, Jack deciding it was no more weird for a nun than the way she was dressed. She had offered him one, a Kool Filter King. He told her he’d quit three years ago.
“In prison?”
“After I got out. When I was in there I smoked all the time.”
Before lighting up she asked if he’d mind and he thought of Buddy Jeannette in the hotel suite that night his life changed. “You mind if I smoke?” Now wondering if the same thing could be happening with a nun, thinking that in the past week he had seen two old movies on TV where guys were with nuns in strange situations . . .
She said, “I left you up in the air. I come here and the place overwhelms me.”
“It’s a lot bigger than you think it’s gonna be.”
“What I should remember, it’s also a public health service hospital.”
“Why do you have to remember that?”
“It’s operated by the federal government. Anyone with an in can find out things.”
He said, “Yeah?” and waited.
“You don’t see the connection, do you?”
He said, “We started out you thought I knew things I didn’t. Well, if you’re still under that impression then I’m sorry but I can’t help you. I’m only the driver and I’m not even doing that.” Letting her see some of his irritation. Why not? She was a sister, but she wasn’t going to make him stay after and clean the erasers if he talked back. “You want the colonel to think she’s dead, I can understand that. But why go to all this trouble if he’s busy down in Nicaragua?”
“He isn’t down in Nicaragua,” Sister Lucy said, back to business, her voice quiet, in control. “He’s in New Orleans.”
“Guy’s fighting a war, he drops everything to come after the girl, what’d you say, defiled him?”
“Jack, he was military attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington. He came here in ’79, to Miami, when Somoza’s government fell, and we know he was in New Orleans before he went back to Nicaragua. He has friends here. You must know they’re getting all kinds of support from the U.S.” She paused and said, “Don’t you?” Frowning a little. She blew out a stream of smoke and said, “What we know is that the colonel traced us to Mexico and then here. Now he’s here and has inquired about Amelita. He hasn’t sent flowers, Jack, he wants to kill her.”
Listen to the nun. He watched her mash the cigarette in the ashtray and close it.
“There’s a doctor here, on the staff, who spent years in Nicaragua and was a friend of Rudolfo Meza . . .”
“The one the colonel shot.”
“Murdered. At the time I arrived with Amelita I told him the whole story. So he knew the situation and got in touch with me as soon as he found out the colonel had called, asking about her. Right after that she had a visitor, not the colonel but a Nicaraguan. Sister Teresa Victor told him Amelita was seriously ill and couldn’t see anyone.”
“The whole hospital’s in on it? What we’re doing?”
“No, not administration; some of the staff. I think a few of the doctors and of course the sisters. There won’t be a death certificate. But if anyone inquires the sisters will say they’re not permitted to give out information about the deceased, well, other than she was taken to a funeral home.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Then all you have to do is put a notice in the paper that Amelita Sosa was cremated. She doesn’t know a soul here, so anyone who inquires would have to be the colonel or a friend of his.”
“I put a notice in the paper.”
“Isn’t that what you do? I’ll pay for it.”
“What’re you getting me into?”
She said, “I don’t think there’s the least chance you’ll be in any kind of physical danger.”
“It’s not the physical kind I’m thinking about.”
“Sister Teresa Victor spoke to Mr. Mullen . . .” But now she didn’t seem too sure about it. “At least she said she did.”
“She told Leo the whole story?”
“Maybe not all the details.”
“Maybe not any of ’em. What you’re talking about here, don’t you think is illegal?”