From somewhere in the middle of the crowd, Mr. Hosokawa stepped forward, reached into his pocket, and extended to her his handkerchief, clean and pressed. It was odd, he thought, to have been so reduced, to have so little to offer, and yet she took it as if his handkerchief were the thing she had most been hoping for and pressed it beneath her eyes.
“All of you go back,” General Benjamin said, not wanting to watch another touching exchange. He went and sat down in one of the large wing-backed chairs near the fireplace and lit a cigarette. There was nothing to do. He couldn’t strike her the way he should have, surely there would have been an insurrection in the living room and he wasn’t certain that the younger members of his army would not shoot in her defense. What he didn’t understand was why he felt grief for the accompanist. Alfredo was right, it wasn’t as if this was the first person to die. Most days it seemed like half the people he knew were dead. The thing was the people he knew had been murdered, slaughtered in a host of ways that prevented him from sleeping well at night, and this man, the accompanist, had simply died. Somehow, those two things did not seem exactly the same. He thought of his brother in prison, his brother, as good as dead, sitting day after day in a cold, dark hole. He wondered if his brother could stay alive a little while longer, maybe just a day or two, until their demands were met and he could be released. The accompanist’s death had worried him. People could simply die if no one got to them in time. He looked up from his cigarette. “Get away from here,” he said to the crowd, and with that they all stepped away. Even Roxane got up and left her corpse as she was told. She seemed tired now. He commanded his troops to resume their positions. The guests were to go and sit and wait.
Alfredo went to the phone and picked it up hesitantly, as if he wasn’t exactly sure what it could do. Warfare should not include cellular phones, it made everything seem less serious. He reached into one of the many pockets on his green fatigue pants and pulled out a business card and dialed Messner. He told him there had been an illness, no, a death, and that they needed to negotiate the retrieval of the body.
Without the accompanist, everything was different. One would think the sentence should read: Without the extra one hundred and seventeen hostages, everything was different, or Now that terrorists had said they were not there to kill them, everything seemed different. But that wasn’t true. It was the accompanist they felt the loss of, even all the men who had so recently sent their wives and lovers outside, watched them walk away in the full splendor of their evening dress, they were thinking of the dead man. They had not known him at all. Many assumed he was an American. There they were, steadily producing insulin as a matter of course while another man died without it so that he could stay with the woman he loved. Each asked himself if he would have done the same and each decided the chances were good that he would not. The accompanist embodied a certain recklessness of love that they had not possessed since their youth. What they did not understand was that Roxane Coss, who now sat in the corner of one of the large down sofas, weeping quietly into Mr. Hosokawa’s handkerchief, had never been in love with her accompanist, that she had hardly known him at all except in a professional capacity, and that when he had tried to express his feelings to her it turned out to be a disastrous mistake. The kind of love that offers its life so easily, so stupidly, is always the love that is not returned. Simon Thibault would never die in a foolish gesture for Edith. On the contrary, he would take every cowardly recourse available to him to ensure that their lives were spent together. But without all the necessary facts, no one understood what had happened, and all they could think was that the accompanist had been a better, braver man, that he had loved more fully than they were capable of loving.
Everything was slack now. The huge arrangements of flowers that were placed around the room were already wilting, the smallest edge of brown trimmed the petals of the white roses. The half-empty glasses of champagne that sat on end tables and sideboards were flat and warm. The young guards were so exhausted that some fell asleep against the wall and slid down to the floor without waking. The guests stayed in the living room, whispering a little but mostly being quiet. They curled into overstuffed chairs and slept. They did not test the patience of their guards. They took cushions off the sofa and stretched out on the floor in a way that was reminiscent of the night before but much better. They knew they were to stay in the living room, be mostly quiet, avoid sudden moves. No one considered slipping out of the bathroom window when they took themselves to the lavatory unattended, maybe out of some unspoken gentleman’s agreement. A certain forced respect had been shown to the body of the accompanist, their accompanist, and now they had to try to live up to the standards he had set.
When Messner came in he asked first to see Roxane Coss. His lips seemed thinner now, stern, and he thoughtlessly spoke in German. Gen pushed up heavily from his chair and went to tell them what was being said. The Generals pointed to the woman on the couch, whose face was still pressed into a handkerchief.
“And she will be coming out now,” Messner said, not as a question.
“The President is coming over?” General Alfredo said.
“You do expect to let her ride home with the body.” It was not the Messner they had seen before. The sight of a room full of hostages forced to lie on the floor, the battered Vice President, the boys with their weapons, all of that had only made him tired, but he was angry now. Angry with nothing but a small red plus sign strapped over his upper arm to protect himself from a roomful of guns.
His anger seemed to inspire an extraordinary patience in the Generals. “The dead,” Hector explained, “know nothing of who is sitting beside them.”
“You said all women.”
“We came up through the air-conditioning vents,” General Benjamin said, and then after a pause he added a descriptive phrase. “Like moles.”
“I need to know if I can trust you,” Messner said. Gen only wished he could parody the weight of his voice, the way he struck every word like a soft mallet against a drum. “If you tell me something, am I to believe you?”
“We set free the servants, the ill, and all of the women but one. Perhaps there is something about this one that interests you. Perhaps if we had kept another it wouldn’t have mattered so much to you.”
“Am I to believe you?”
General Benjamin thought about this for a moment. He lifted his hand as if to stroke his cheek but then thought better of it. “We are not on the same side.”
“The Swiss never take sides,” Messner said. “We are only on the side of the Swiss.”
None of the Generals had anything more to say to Messner, who needed no confirmation that the accompanist lying at his feet was, indeed, dead. The priest had covered the body with a tablecloth and the tablecloth stayed in place. Messner went out the door without pleasantries and returned an hour later with a helper. They brought in a rolling gurney of the type that comes from an ambulance, covered in boxes and sacks, and when they were unloaded Messner and his helper lowered the gurney and tried to tug the large man up. They ultimately had to be assisted by several of the younger terrorists. Death had made the body dense, as if every recital performed, each day’s never-ending practice, came back in those final moments and balanced like lead bars across his chest. When he was in place and strapped down, his fine hands dangling from beneath the cutwork tablecloth, they took him away. Roxane Coss turned her head as if to study the couch pillows. Mr. Hosokawa wondered if she was thinking about Brunhilde, if she was wishing for a horse that would take her into the fire after her lover’s corpse.