This was on the outskirts of the capital, where Boulevard de la Révolution used to run through the shantytowns to the old aerodrome. In those days, three or four révolutions ago, we still had a base out by the north runway—we, the Americans: a half dozen hangars full of men and matériel, deployed to remind the Big Man, in his palace across the lagoon, that he was beholden to our interests. One of the Marine guards at the embassy had told me they had a pool table there, and a strategic supply of bourbon, and that if I wanted to partake, I could join him any Saturday. So that’s where I was bound, behind the wheel of the absurd car I’d bought off my predecessor, a canary-yellow Buick Skylark that some long-ago diplomat had shipped in new in 1975, on the taxpayers’ dime, and had been passed down through the years, through the embassy ranks, as it depreciated from showboat to relic to little more, by the time it became mine, than a gag. Saturday was market day, and the streams of pedestrians spilling along the road’s shoulders in the shantytowns were particularly dense that afternoon. It was rainy season, the light mercurial and shuddering under greasy-gray clouds. And just as the skies opened, a black Mercedes appeared in my rearview mirror. A black Mercedes meant power; it was the car of rank among the Big Man’s cronies, the car of those in a position to command the big bribes for the big favors—the car that signified that the person it carried was one of those whom everyone else in the country called “an unaccountable.” This one, in my rearview, wasn’t slowing down as it closed in on me. The headlights flashed. The horn sounded. It wanted me out of the way, and I wanted the same. The rain was crashing down too fast for my old Buick’s wipers. Everything was a blur. Then something hit my car with a juddering thump and crack, and a hideous grating sound came from below. I’d killed a man—I felt sure of it at once—a bicyclist who I swear wasn’t there the split second before. His bike had flipped under my car, and he’d flipped over it, and as I stopped the car, right there in the road, a boy tapped my window and pressed his face as close to mine as the glass would allow, pointing to where the body lay, then running his finger over his throat, and popping his eyebrows in alarm as he mouthed the word: “Vas-y! Vas-y . . .” Go! Go . . .
That’s what everyone always said there: if you hit someone, don’t stop—the people will mob you, and hold court on the spot, rob you or stomp you or both, and you’ll be lucky to live to tell of it. My predecessor, when he sold me the Skylark, when he handed me the keys, said, “Just hope you don’t kill anyone.” I told him I didn’t plan on it. He said, “You should—it happens all the time here, and you’ll have a lot better chance if you’ve got a plan.” He told me that he’d heard that sometimes, when a poor child died, the family would wait by the roadside to throw the body in front of a foreigner’s car and cry bloody murder until the whole neighborhood mobbed in for the shakedown. I thought that sounded far-fetched. “Very,” he said. “I see no reason to believe it, except that one ignores such legends at one’s peril.”
None of this made any sense to me now. How could I go? Where could I go? You couldn’t exactly disappear in that Buick. The rain was already spent, little more than a drizzle, and I could see that a great crowd had gathered around me, albeit at a wary distance, so that my car seemed to stand in a sort of clearing, and I had the sense that everyone was waiting to see what I would do to see what they would do. Probably I didn’t think anything quite so clear as that, but that was the feeling, as I put the car in park and, leaving it idling, opened my door and stood in the road.
As soon as I appeared, a man peeled away from the crowd and strolled slowly toward me, holding his empty hands out in a consoling gesture, saying, “Don’t worry about it, it’s over, he’s finished, be calm, it was an accident, an accident.” He came at me, repeating himself, and sidled past, and was gone. Then there was another man, coming at the same angle. This man was brandishing a big stick, and muttering angrily, and as he came a woman’s voice rose in fury behind me. I had forgotten about the black Mercedes, but of course it had to stop when I did, and out of it now erupted a magnificent woman in a flaming flower-print dress, with her head wrapped in a blazing orange turban. She flew at the man with the stick, this great grand fireball of a woman, crying out in a voice as loud as her outfit and even more adamant: “Stop! Don’t you touch him. It was an accident! You animal. Look—this is a man. He didn’t run. He got out. He has courage. He did right.”
I didn’t feel courageous or right, or like I had anything to do with this woman’s spectacular passion, but the stick man shrank away, and she—suddenly calm, almost in a stage whisper, as if we knew each other well and were in this together—told me: “Go on, now, get out of here. I’ll sort this out, like it never happened.”
What did that mean? I started to protest: “It did happen. There’s a body. That can’t be denied.” But she had turned away from me, and was moving into the crowd, dispersing it as she went.
• • •
Was that the moment I fell in love with her? I had no idea who she was. I didn’t know her name. I wasn’t even sure if she was real, or some apparition born of my state of shock. In my memory, she had no accent, which seemed as impossible as everything else about her. But when she spoke to me in that soothing conspiratorial voice, I had felt from her, all at once, a powerful warmth and a powerful corruption, and when she showed me her back and stepped away, I felt my heart lurch after her.
I must have done as she told me. I don’t remember driving back to my house, but there I was—and I did not go out again for days. I didn’t report the accident. I called the embassy without mentioning it, saying only that I had fever, and that was no lie. I slept an awful lot of the time, and spent my waking hours in a fugue state, with my collision replaying itself, as if on an unceasing loop tape in my mind. Or, I should really say my collisions—plural: the first with the bicyclist, and the second with that woman.
Both seemed to me at once unreal and inevitable. Perhaps a week passed in this limbo. My phone kept ringing—the same unknown number. When I finally answered it, I knew her voice at once. She told me her name was Fatima. She said she’d been thinking of me, and I felt that lurch again in my chest. I didn’t need to ask how she, a woman with such a black Mercedes and such an air of command, had found me, a guy with such a Buick. I said I’d been thinking of her, too. I said, “I mean, where did you come from?” “Right here,” she said, but she’d gone to college in Wisconsin, which at least explained her accent.
I had been half expecting in the days since our encounter to be summoned by the police for an inquiry; and I asked Fatima now if it didn’t seem wrong to her that a man had died, and that there were no consequences.
“I told you that I’d fix it,” she said. “You know that’s how it is here—you’re an American, I’m not a nobody, either.”
“Unaccountables,” I said.
“Please,” she said sharply. “Should I have left you to the mob there? Or had you arrested? Would that make anything better?” She waited for me to answer, and when I didn’t, she said: “I want to see you. I don’t want to talk about this. It’s pointless. Okay? Can I come over?”
• • •
Fatima. She knew what she wanted, and when she got it, she had a great, full-throated, openmouthed laugh, made all the more joyous by a generous gap between her top front teeth. That’s how I remember the first nonstop weeks of our affair, talking and touching, out on the town, or back at my place, in bed—as one long gust of unchecked, lusty laughter.
It was her town, so she led the way, and she was careful to keep a low profile, always driving a little Japanese car when she came to see me, never the black Mercedes. She wore jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps, making herself as nondescript-looking as she could, and took me to quiet little out-of-the-way places where nobody seemed to notice her, much less to know her. And we always returned to my place—she never once invited me to hers.
I didn’t much mind. Of course she wanted privacy. Or that was how I figured it, anyway, until one night, as we lay naked beneath my ceiling fan, I told her, “You know what, Fati? I love you.” And she said, “How much?”
That made me laugh. “You mean, like—would I die for you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “What good would you be to me dead? No. I mean, would you kill for me?”
What if I had said yes? Would I now be telling you a different story? I didn’t say no. I told her: “I would prefer not to.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” she said. She sounded irritated, and that irritated me. “Come on,” I said, “has anybody ever loved you liked that, Fatima?”
“Without a doubt,” she said. “The man I’m supposed to marry does.”
That was the first I’d heard of such a man. She seemed surprised by my surprise. She thought it was obvious that we were only enjoying each other as a diversion until, inevitably, the rest of our lives reclaimed us. She said, “I’ve been pledged to marry him since we were six years old.”
Their fathers had made the arrangement as part of a pact that ended nearly a century of bloody political and business feuds between two of the country’s most powerful families. It was a gentleman’s agreement, but to Fatima it had always seemed an inescapable destiny. Only in her Wisconsin years had she ever known what she called “the savage freedom of not belonging.”
“I could have stayed there,” she said. “I could have just become this Fatima-the-American you seem to fancy. Well, I didn’t.”
“So you’re saying that you belong to him—this man who’d kill for you?”
“No more than he belongs to me.”
I had pulled a sheet over my body, and Fatima got out of bed and got dressed.
“What about you?” I said. “Would you kill for him?”
“That’s the deal,” she said, “the pact our fathers made. Brutal—yeah, maybe. But breaking that pact would be way more brutal.”
• • •
I found this note, slipped under my door, two mornings later—a single paragraph, without salutation or signature:
I can’t blame you and I don’t blame you. To blame you for wanting my wife would be to disparage her. That you want her means only that you are a man. So what? That she must have wanted you too—that is the problem. That means you are a man whose existence is intolerable to me. You must understand my need for relief. There are many ways that I could dispose of you, just as there are many ways that I could end my own life. Those are the two solutions to our mutual predicament. A duel presents the most unprejudiced means of determining which of them will be our fate. I trust that a man worthy of my wife’s interest will not hesitate to give me the satisfaction of accepting my challenge.
Was he joking—the fiancé? Apparently not, because as I sat rereading the note in bewilderment for the sixth or seventh time, he phoned and, after announcing himself, instructed me to meet him “for our contest” at dawn the next day at such and such a secluded pasture alongside the lagoon. Then, without waiting for a response, he hung up. Not fifteen minutes later, a messenger came to my door, handed me a large envelope, and hurried away. Inside was another note: “I will bring pistols. You will have the choice of weapons. In all other particulars we will proceed according to the rules detailed in the pamphlet here enclosed.”
I never looked at that pamphlet. I didn’t like being ordered around, and I couldn’t have cared less about the rules of dueling. I knew nothing about pistols, had only fired one a few times in my life, and had never had even a fleeting wish to shoot another person. The absurdity of the situation maddened me—and, at the same time, the absurdity appealed to me, too. My thoughts spun and scrambled. It seemed obvious to me that I could not go through with this folly, and equally obvious that I must. No doubt it was a trap. Or perhaps the fiancé really did want to commit suicide by summoning me to shoot him. But then again he had made clear that he would do away with me if I didn’t show up, so I might as well take my chances. And maybe I deserved it. Maybe all I had wanted since I struck that bicyclist was punishment, some commensurate measure of annihilating oblivion.
Time flew, and time stalled, and noon became dusk, and suddenly it was past midnight, and I did not know what I would do, and I knew I would do it. Was Fatima behind this? Was this the killing she wanted me to do for her to prove my love? I had no idea. I would never know. I had only one way to know.
“You must understand my need for relief.” Yes, fiancé, yes, that was the only thing I understood absolutely, as I eased the Skylark through the fog-shrouded streets of the sleeping city in the first damp gray light of false dawn. When I pulled up to the field, a riot of crows tumbled from a stand of scraggly trees and filled the air overhead. The fiancé stood beside a black Mercedes. I had not seen him before and could not see him too clearly now. His second approached, carrying a box with a pair of pistols. The weapon I took felt good in my hand. The second spoke at length, with legalistic precision, explaining what was to happen, but I remember only the cawing of the crows and how that was drowned out, in turn, by songbirds going off everywhere at once in a manic collective euphoria as the night melted into day.
Then we were walking away from each other—the fiancé and I—wading, really, through the dew-heavy grass, holding our pistols, counting our paces. I lost count.
The second called: Halt.
I remember thinking I do not want to die like this. I remember thinking I do not want to live like this.
The second called: Turn and face.
We stood then at our little distance, two men, silhouetted in bright haze, pointing pistols at each other. Were we supposed to shoot now? Was he waiting for me? Was I waiting for him?
The second called: Gentlemen.
What was happening?
Gentlemen!
Why didn’t that man shoot me?
The second called: Fire!
There was some commotion off to the side, a crow beating past, and my arm swung that way, and I shot it. I hit it. I could never do that again. Pure luck, an accident: the bird blew apart, feathers and blood. I was elated. The fiancé had to think that I could have killed him just as easily.
But why didn’t he shoot?
The second called again: Fire!
And there was another commotion: a car swerved onto the field, and jerked to a stop, and out flew Fatima, wailing No! Then the fiancé fired, and Fatima fell.
He shot her in the thigh, and as she went down, he ran to her. It looked, from where I stood, like a tender reunion. He was binding her wounds. She was stroking his face.
• • •
I left them there then. I don’t think anyone noticed. I dropped my pistol in the field, drove the Skylark to the aerodrome, and twenty-four hours later I was sitting in a rocking chair on my mother’s porch in New Jersey.
I was sitting there still a couple months later when the mailman brought me a postcard: “It was only a flesh wound. He’s a very good shot. I didn’t even need a cane at our wedding. You see, as promised, everything’s fixed like nothing ever happened. Love, Fatima.”