Half the Day Is Night Read online

  They walked to the next house. David kept his arm around her shoulders and did not allow her to look back. He kept expecting the explosion behind him, kept waiting for it to go off, knowing it would startle him. Each minute it didn’t go off made him think that maybe it wouldn’t; that Mayla’s house, the yellow sun, the black car, the music chips, Tim’s vacuum coffee maker, his clothes, everybody’s clothes and toothbrushes—he wished he had brushed his teeth—and the pots and pan and the groceries would all be all right. That they could go back inside and forget it.

  David pushed the buzzer. A woman’s voice said, “Yes?”

  “Hello,” he said to the air. “My name is David Dai, I work for Mayla Ling, your neighbor? May we make a call from here?”

  “Step back please?”

  He assumed they were being surveyed.

  “Ms. Magritte?” Mayla said.

  “Oh, hello Ms. Ling.” Then nothing. David looked at Mayla, wondered what was going on. Then he realized Ms. Magritte had to come down and let them in. So they waited and he ignored Mayla’s house and the big steel doors.

  Ms. Magritte’s garage door opened. The domes on this street didn’t have front doors. Or sidewalks or windows on the street or any of the other places and ways that neighbors were neighbors. “Hello, Ms. Ling,” Ms. Magritte said, smiling. She was a tiny dark woman who spoke American-accented English. “Is there a problem with your system?”

  “No,” Mayla said, “there’s a bomb in my house.”

  That struck Tim as funny.

  Ms. Magritte did not know what to say.

  “We have to call the police,” Mayla said.

  “Oh my God,” Ms. Magritte said. She looked up and down the street as if she might see someone, and then at Mayla’s garage doors. “Who—” Ms. Magritte started and then closed her mouth.

  “I’m not political,” Mayla said. “It’s because of my position at the bank, I think.”

  Ms. Magritte nodded as if this explained something and led them upstairs. David relinquished Mayla to Tim’s arm. He handed the cat to Mayla and was amused to realize that it was good there was no one else who needed watching because he was working against the law of diminishing returns. “Careful,” he said, “he scratched me.” Welts stood on his hand. Mayla nodded. Like Xhosa refugees, he thought. She would be all right as long as he could keep telling her what to do. Tim would be fine as long as he did not allow himself to realize. And he would be all right, he reflected wryly, as long as he had to keep telling her what to do.

  “I have a Steuben glass bud vase from the 1900s,” Mayla said to Ms. Magritte. “It was my grandmother’s from Hawaii. I was afraid to take it to work because I was sure someone would knock it off my desk. Isn’t that ironic? Of course, David says it may not go off. I guess I should have put it away where it would be safe but I always felt what’s the use of having those kind of things if you don’t leave them out where you can see them and enjoy them?”

  Ms. Magritte licked her lips. “I think you should sit down and have a cup of coffee. Then after your man calls the police maybe I should call Girardin. Girardin is my husband, Ms. Ling, I’m sure you remember him?”

  David made the call. He wanted to relate things crisply, not wasting words. Unfortunately the officer kept interrupting him, asking him about things before he’d gotten to them and then making him go back to explain. But he had been through this kind of thing before; people who did not know how to take a briefing. “No sir, I don’t know when it got there … yes sir, a pressure trigger … yes sir, I’ve seen them before, in the war in South Africa … no sir, I’m not a citizen, I work for Ms. Ling … no sir, I’ve never seen one like it … the trigger, just the trigger, I’ve never seen liquid explosive … I don’t know, it could be nitroglycerine for all I know, it looks transparent … nitroglycerine … no sir, I didn’t say it was that. Nitroglycerine is something people used to use, like dynamite, a hundred years ago. It could be anything, I don’t know … I was a chemist before the war … no sir, I don’t know, I was just making the point that I do not recognize it, you see? I do not think it is nitroglycerine … no, I did not touch it, it would probably explode … yes sir, everybody is out … we will be waiting outside … yes sir, the watertight doors are shut. Goodbye—what?… David, David Dai … D, A, I … the records might be under Jean David Dai, that is my whole name … yes sir, that’s right, Mayla Ling … yes, French … yes sir … thank you sir … good-bye.

  David took back the cat and they thanked Ms. Magritte and went outside, standing together. They watched the door and looked up the street at the direction the police would come. The cat clung, curious and frightened. David’s hand hurt where Meph had scratched him. He realized he was tapping nervously on his hip and made himself stop.

  “This is crazy,” Tim said to no one in particular. He kept shaking his head, as if this were some sort of amazing entertainment.

  The sound of sirens set David’s teeth on edge. It was a scream that bounced around stone tunnels and made it impossible to tell where the noise was coming from. It was unsafe under the artificial lights. Of course, lights were confusing for pilots in the old night-vision goggles the Prots used. Not like the new German goggles that compensated. He realized he was thinking they would use the lights to call in strikes. The first car rocked around the corner, a blue-and-white Julian patrol car. They turned the siren off but left the blue-and-white lights flashing and shifting across the walls and the street, glancing off the metal doors. Far off another screech was colliding with the walls and corners. Doors slammed, an officer pointed at them, he straightened up. He identified himself to the officer and said that he was the one who had called. The officer was black, one of ours, he thought. He told the young officer—whose eyes kept disappearing behind the polished visor of his cap when the light reflected off it—what he’d found and what they’d done (leaving out the part about the cat) and which doors they’d shut. While he was talking, a third and fourth car parked next to the first two, cutting off the back half of the street. He had to wait until they shut off their sirens to finish speaking. They left their lights on. It bothered his eyes. He wondered if he’d ever be able to stand the sun again.

  The officer walked over to Mayla who was standing by the first car. He stopped, nodded respectfully. There were white officers and that seemed strange. In Africa he had worked with mostly black troops.

  The cat squirmed. David relaxed and scratched his ears, but Meph laid them back and mewed, his eyes slitted against the flashing lights. A lower siren set Meph squalling, a skid pulled up, lights flashing blue and green. Men in combat beige overalls stepped out and began to pull out equipment. Explosives Unit.

  He shifted his shoulders and then realized he had no rifle. An officer came up and told him to move back behind the cars, out of the way. Of course, here it didn’t matter what color the officers were, this was not Afrique. People had begun to collect and a civilian crew pulled up and took out vid equipment. Mayla was talking to someone, her hands were in motion as she explained something. From where he stood her eyes were hidden by the shadow of her hair except when the light from the cars swept across her face. Then the blue light made her face perfectly white, and her eyes, hair and mouth were as black as water.

  “Lieutenant,” someone said to his left and he turned but it was an officer talking to one of the men from the skid. Meph mewed and he realized he was squeezing too hard. Relax, he told himself. He was waiting for the explosion and he knew when it came he was going to start, he was wound up tight and there was nothing he could do except wait.

  “Is this like the bomb on Esperance?”

  “I think. Nobody’s seen it yet. One of her staff described it,” the lieutenant said.

  “They usually go off.”

  “Either they do when they come in or they don’t at all,” the lieutenant said. “Usually once they’ve fucked with the trigger it either works or it doesn’t.”

  “What about Desalines?”

 
“That one had been there awhile. Usually, though, they go off or they do not.”

  The officer nodded, “This one probably won’t—”

  The explosion was a thud-thump, the watertight doors into the garage held for maybe a tenth of a second and then there was the hammer blow of the water hitting the main doors. The water immediately muted the sound, giving it an odd, flat quality.

  Then silence.

  David raised his head. He was behind a car with the cat shielded by his body. The force of the water hitting the big garage doors had warped them, bowed them out, but they must have been built to do that. The lights slid down one wall, across the street, angled up another wall and across the warped doors, meeting and forming and splintering again, back down the walls. He was the only person who had ducked, everyone else stood staring. He tensed for the firing to begin, or for the mortars to start elephant walking down the street.

  Somebody whistled appreciatively.

  David got up. This was just his job, no one was going to start shooting. He looked at Mayla, standing next to an officer, staring at the doors, and she was not anyone he knew.

  Screw it. Someone else was handling it. The walls rose up, more sharply than the spine of the ridge of highlands behind the wash, where Namibia and Kalahari almost met, about Rehoboth. His knee ached, remembering Rehoboth. He cradled the cat who was too frightened to complain. Nobody was looking at him. They were walking to the doors, or reaching into their cars to call the station.

  An officer told the crowd to disperse. It was only a dozen people but David stepped back through them, became part of them, walked down the street trying to give the impression of purpose. He kept his head down and did not look back. At the end of the street he waited. The tunnel buses ran fairly often, although he’d never taken one, he’d seen them. He hoped he didn’t have to wait long. He counted slowly, in French, and at 512 one coasted around the bend. He looked back.

  Tim Bennet was tall enough and blond enough to stand out in the group. He was looking at David. Even from the distance David could tell.

  He didn’t know what to do. He expected Tim would shout, say something to someone. He put his foot on the step.

  Tim Bennet was watching him, but he didn’t move.

  David got on and paid with change out of his pocket, “The cat is a problem?” he asked, hoping he would not have to get off and let the cat go, or walk.

  “No problem,” the driver said.

  He hadn’t even looked at the front of the bus to see if it said where it was going. He knew where he was going.

  Away.

  6

  House Arrest

  The blue and whites brought her home in a patrol car. She had to stand on the street and use the intercom to ask Jude to open the door. Then she had to go to her grandfather who was eating soup and tell him, “Someone blew up my house, sent a bomb in the mail and it blew up.”

  Her grandfather looked up at her, holding the spoon in his shaking hand. “What did you do?” he demanded.

  He wasn’t asking her what she did when it happened, he was asking her what she did to cause it.

  “I don’t know,” she said, honestly. And then, to her great embarrassment, she felt the heat in her face and the threatening tears. She cleared her throat to explain that she thought that she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but when she tried to speak, her voice shook and broke. “I don’t know,” she managed again and he looked away.

  He wanted her to stop crying. He didn’t know what to do when she cried. He hated crying, it made him nervous.

  He waited, and she looked at the vid. The vid was sitting on the counter where he could watch it while he ate. Jude had put on the mute when they came in, and a man and a woman were standing in a jungle, speaking intently and soundlessly to each other.

  Finally she said again, “I don’t know.”

  “You stay here, Mayla Lee,” he said gently.

  Just that. But it made her cry and Jude put his arms around her and told her it was all right, that she was safe now. Her grandfather stood up and patted her back awkwardly. She thought she was crying from gratitude. He was telling her that he loved her enough to bring her trouble into his house.

  Anything could happen. And if anything could happen, then true love was trusting, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  David Dai had disappeared. The blue and whites thought that it was possible that there had been collusion between David and Anna Eminike. An officer sat on the sheet-covered couch in Mayla’s gram’s sitting room. “It explains why he runs, and why he is hard to find. Because he has help to hide, you see?” The blue and white was a chubby young island boy with big eyes and an air of earnest helpfulness.

  It didn’t sound right to Mayla. If David were working with La Mano de Diós then why had he still been in the house when the bomb arrived?

  “He was a dupe,” the officer said. “La Mano de Diós used him. They didn’t tell him the bomb was going to come.”

  “Why would he go to them for help to hide if they used him?”

  “Maybe they had made a plan, not expecting him to be alive to use it. To make him think they would help him. And now he is using it.”

  She pointed out that David came to her immediately when he was approached in the parking.

  The officer thought about this. “These people, anyone connected with La Mano de Diós, they all are under constant surveillance,” he said. “Maybe they were afraid that we would find out that he was working with them. They met him in the parking, and to divert the suspicions of any watchers he pretended to turn them away.” He nodded to himself, warming to his own theory, liking the taste of it in his mouth. “And when you were shot at in the parking the gunman had intended to miss. They were establishing Dai as a target.”

  “What was the point, the profit,” she asked. “Why plant a spy in my house? There wasn’t anything for them to learn, I don’t have any information.”

  “Connections.” He rolled his eyes. “La Mano de Diós looks for patterns.”

  God’s surgeons. One event has innumerable ramifications, ripples in Mandelbrot patterns of chaos, and God told Anna Eminike the things to do to initiate God’s patterns. Murder this person. Bomb that house. Sense in every moment, divine inspiration in every random action. God alone saw whole.

  “We aren’t saying that he is working with them,” the officer said. “We’re just considering the possibility.” He made this qualification without real conviction. The sheet he was sitting on had a pattern of pale washed flowers in pink. Her gram had liked pink. Mayla’s sheets were gone. She had not had any pink sheets in her whole house and now she was back sleeping on pink sheets.

  “He’d only been here a month,” Mayla said. “It’s not very likely that they could recruit him and convert him in a month.”

  “Maybe he met Eminike in Africa,” the officer said.

  “That’s pretty thin, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Why did he run?” the officer asked.

  She didn’t know. That was the simple truth, she didn’t know why he had run. She didn’t know why her house was gone.

  “I think he’d had it,” Tim said. Tim had watched him get on the bus. He said David had just walked to the end of the street, waited until one came and got on.

  “And you didn’t think about stopping him?” The blue and white asked.

  He just sounded curious but Tim squirmed. “I figured,” Tim said, “if he wanted to tell somebody he would have. I wasn’t thinking about him being a possible terrorist, I mean, he kept talking about how he wasn’t the right person to work for Mayla and about going home and he said how he thought that this country was crazy. I just thought that enough had happened that the guy should be allowed to leave if he wanted to. I was beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to go somewhere else, you know, standing out there.”

  “Where did you think he was going?” the officer asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tim said.


  “Did you think he would come back, get in touch? That he was going to see friends?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” Tim said. “You know, Mayla’s house had just been blown up.” But then he shook his head. “No, I guess I wouldn’t say he’d come back.”

  “Why not?” the officer said.

  Tim stared at his hands. Finally he said, “If you’d seen him. Just the way he looked, you know.”

  “Try to explain,” the officer said. He was smarter than he acted, more patient than Mayla has suspected and she suddenly felt a chill.

  “I don’t know, purposeful, I guess. Like … I don’t know.”

  The officer prompted, “Purposeful. Like he knew where he was going?”

  “Of course he knew where he was going,” Tim said, “it’s a bloody dead-end street. And no, I’m not saying he was going to meet some frigging terrorists.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Tim shook his head. “If you’d seen him, you’d know what I mean.”

  “Ah,” the blue and white said.

  Oh God, Mayla thought, they were going to pin it on David.

  * * *

  Mayla’s grandfather’s house had breath—cool air moved in the rooms and the tall peacock feathers drifted—but no life. By Caribbean standards it was old. It had been built when the first and second levels of Julia were the only levels, sixty years ago. It was, in its way, a frontier house: built in a big square and starkly simple, just a concrete warren of blind rooms and corridors closed in on itself.

  Her gram had tried to make it pretty. She had put mirrors on the walls to create windows and had filled the rooms with spindly wooden tables covered with lace and tall red and yellow Chinese vases filled with pale fronds of pampas grass and peacock feathers. When she was a girl Mayla had loved her gram’s things.

  The mirrors reflected mirrors on the opposite walls so that the tables covered with knickknacks and pictures of cousins and family and the Virgin in silver frames were reflected in infinite progression. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, Mayla thought she saw movement in the rooms at the backs of the mirrors.