When the priest opened his eyes he saw that he and the accompanist were no longer alone. Father Arguedas smiled gently at the assembled crowd. “Who can separate us from the love of Christ?” he said by way of explanation.
When Roxane Coss sank to the floor it was a lovely sight, the pale green chiffon of her dress billowing out like a canopy of new spring leaves caught in a sweep of April wind. She took in her hands the hand that his mother had been so careful with, the hand she had watched play Schumann lieder hour after hour without tiring. The hand was cold already, and the colors of his face, which hadn’t seemed right for hours, were quickly becoming very wrong, yellow around the eyes, a pale lavender creeping up near his lips. His tie was gone, as were the studs from his shirtfront, but he still wore his black tails and white waistcoat. He was still dressed for performance. Never for a minute had she thought he was a bad man. And he had been a brilliant pianist. It was just that he shouldn’t have waited until they were sealed up in that plane to tell her how he felt about her, and now that he was dead she wouldn’t even hold that against him.
All the men had left their wall and come to the other side of the room, where they stood, more or less shoulder to shoulder with the band of terrorists. Every one of them had resented the accompanist, thought he was too lucky for being able to play the piano so well, thought he was too forward, the way he had shielded her from the rest of them. But when he was dead they felt the loss of him. He had died for her after all. Even from across the room in languages they may not have understood, they could follow the story clearly. He had never told her he was a diabetic. He had chosen to stay with her rather than ask for the insulin that could save his life. The poor accompanist, their friend. He was one of them.
“Now a man is dead!” General Benjamin said, throwing up his hands. His own illness flared at the thought of it and the pain was like hot needles sewing together the nerve endings of his face.
“It isn’t as if men haven’t died,” General Alfredo answered coolly. He had nearly died himself more times than he could remember: a bullet in his stomach, that nearly killed him! Two fingers shot off not six months after that, then last year a bullet passing cleanly through the side of his neck.
“We are not here to kill these people. We are here to take the President and to go.”
“No President,” Alfredo reminded him.
General Hector, trusting no one, reached down and pressed his own thin fingers against the dead man’s jugular. “Perhaps we should shoot him, put his body outside. Let them know who they’re dealing with.”
Father Arguedas, who had been keeping to his prayers, looked up and stared at the Generals pointedly. The idea of shooting their new-dead friend made the Spanish-speaking hostages recoil. Those who had not previously known that Roxane Coss did not speak the language were now sure of it because she remained in the same position, her head in her hands, her skirt circled out around her, while the Generals spoke of desecration.
A German named Lothar Falken, who knew just enough Spanish to get the vaguest idea of what was going on, sidled up to Gen in the crowd and asked him to translate.
“Tell them it won’t work,” he said. “The wound won’t bleed. You could shoot him straight through the head now and they’d still figure out soon enough that he didn’t die of a gunshot wound.” Lothar was the vice president of Hoechst, a pharmaceutical company, and had been a biology major at university many years before. He was feeling especially bad about the death, as insulin represented the vast majority of the company’s sales. They were, in fact, Germany’s leading manufacturer of the drug. They had it everywhere back at the office, free samples of every variety of insulin just waiting to be given away, refrigerators full of endless, clinking glass vials there for the taking. He had come to the party because he felt if Nansei was considering an electronics plant in the host country, he might consider manufacturing there as well. Now he was staring at a man who died wanting insulin. He couldn’t save the man’s life, but at least he could spare him the indignity of being killed again.
Gen related the information, trying to choose words that would make the whole thing sound more gruesome rather than less, as he, too, did not want to see the poor accompanist shot.
General Hector took out his gun and stared thoughtfully down the sight. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.
Roxane Coss looked up then. “Who’s he going to shoot?” she asked Gen.
“No one,” Gen assured her.
She wiped her fingers in a straight line beneath her eyes. “Well, he isn’t going to clean his gun. Are they going to start killing us now?” Her voice was tired, practical, as if to say she had a schedule and she needed to know where things stood.
“You might as well tell her the truth,” the Vice President whispered to Gen in Spanish. “If anyone can stop this I would think it would be her.”
It should not be Gen’s responsibility, deciding what was best for her, what to tell and what not to tell. He did not know her. He did not know how she would take such a thing. But then she grabbed his ankle in the same way a standing person might have grabbed a wrist in an argument. He looked down at this famous hand touching his pant’s leg and felt confused.
“English!” she said.
“They’re considering shooting him,” Gen confessed.
“He’s dead,” she said, in case they had missed the point. “How do you say dead in Spanish? Dead.”
“Difunto,” Gen said.
“Difunto!” Her voice was sliding up into the higher registers now. She stood up. At some point she had made the mistake of taking off her shoes, and in a room full of men this small woman seemed especially small. Even the Vice President had several inches on her. But when she put her shoulders back and raised her head it was as if she was willing herself to grow, as if from years of appearing far away on a stage she had learned how to project not just her voice but her entire person, and the rage that was in her lifted her up until she seemed to tower over them. “You understand this,” she said to the Generals. “Any bullet that goes into that man goes through me first.” She was feeling very bad about the accompanist. She had demanded that the flight attendant find her another seat but the flight was full. She had been quite cruel to him on the plane in an attempt to make him be quiet.
She pointed a finger at Gen, who reluctantly told them what she had said.
The men who circled them like a gallery approved of this. Such love! He had died for her, she would die for him!
“You’ve kept one woman, one American, and the one person that anyone in the world has ever heard of before, and if you kill me, and make no mistake, you will have to—are you getting all this?” she said to the translator. “The very wrath of God will come down on you and your people.”
Even though Gen translated, a clear and simple word-for-word translation, every person in the room understood what she was saying without him, in the same way they would have understood her singing Puccini in Italian.
“Take him out of here. Drag him to the front steps if you have to, but you let the people out there send him home in one piece.” A light perspiration had come up on Roxane Coss’s forehead, making her glow like Joan of Arc before the fire. When she was completely finished she took a breath, fully reinflating her massive lungs, and then sat down again. Her back was to the Generals and she bent forward to lean her head against the chest of her accompanist. Resting on this still chest, she drew herself back into composure. She was surprised to find his body comforting and she wondered if it was just that she could like him now that he was dead. Once she felt she was herself again she kissed him to reinforce her point. His lips were slack and cool above the hard resistance of his teeth.