“What’s happened to you?” she whispered. A set of muddy boots walked past. She stretched out beside the accompanist and took his wrist between her fingers.
Finally, the accompanist stirred and sighed and turned to face her, blinking rapidly as if he were trying to rouse himself from a deep and wonderful sleep. “Nothing will happen to you,” he told Roxane Coss, but even with his bluish lips pressed against the side of her head, his voice was distant, exhausted.
“There will be a request for ransom,” Mr. Hosokawa told Gen. They were both watching Roxane and her accompanist now, thinking at several points that the accompanist was dead, but then he would shift or sigh. “It is Nansei’s policy to pay ransom, any ransom. They’ll pay it for both of us.” He could speak in his smallest voice, a sound too minimal to ever be called a whisper, and still Gen understood him perfectly. “They will pay it for her as well. It would only be fitting. She is here on my account.” And the accompanist, especially if he were sick, he should not be forced to stay. Mr. Hosokawa sighed. Actually, in some sense, everyone in the room was here on his account and he wondered what such a ransom could add up to. “I feel that I have brought this on us.”
“You are not holding a gun,” Gen said. The sound of their own Japanese spoken so softly it could not have been heard twelve centimeters away, comforted them. “It was the President they meant to take last night.”
“I wish they had him,” Mr. Hosokawa said.
On the other side of the room near the bottom edge of a gold brocade sofa, Simon and Edith Thibault held each other’s hand. They didn’t settle in with the rest of the French but kept to themselves. They looked very much a pair, nearly brother and sister, with their dark straight hair and blue eyes. They lay on the floor of the dinner party with so much dignity and ease they looked not like two people forced to the floor at gunpoint, but like two people who had simply grown tired of standing. While everyone else lay rigid and trembling, the Thibaults leaned in, her head on his shoulder, his cheek pressed to the crown of her head. He was thinking less of the terrorists and more of the remarkable fact that his wife’s hair smelled of lilacs.
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife.
Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in Paris, and he was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.
“They don’t seem to be in any hurry to kill anyone,” Edith Thibault whispered to her husband, her lips touching his ear.
For as far as the eye can see there is nothing but white sand and bright blue water. Edith walking into the ocean for a swim turns back to him, the water lapping at her thighs. “Shall I bring you a fish?” she calls, and then she is gone, diving under a wave.
“They’ll separate us later,” Simon said.
She wrapped her arm tightly around his and took his hand again. “Let them try.”
There had been a mandatory seminar last year in Switzerland, protocol for the capture of an embassy. He assumed that the rules would apply for overthrown dinner parties as well. They would take the women away. They would— He stopped. He honestly didn’t remember what came after that. He wondered if when they took Edith, if she might have something with her, something of hers he could keep, an earring? How quickly we settle for less! thought Simon Thibault.
What had been a few pockets of careful whispering at first was now a steady hum as people returned from the bathrooms. Having stood up and stretched their legs, they didn’t feel as obedient on the floor. Quietly, people began to have tentative conversations, a murmur and then a dialogue rose up from the floor, until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone. Finally, General Alfredo was driven to shoot another hole in the ceiling, which put an end to that. A few high-pitched yelps and then silence. Not a minute after the gun went off, there was a knock on the door.
Everyone turned to look at the door. With all of the demands, the shuffle of crowds, barking of dogs, chop of helicopters dipping overhead, no one had knocked, and everyone in the house tensed, as one tenses when one does not wish to be disturbed at home. The young terrorists looked nervously at one another, taking deep breaths and slipping their fingers into the empty loop of the trigger guards as if to say that they were ready to kill someone now. The three Generals conferred with one another, did a bit of pointing until there was a line of young men on either side of the door. Then General Benjamin drew his own gun and, nudging the Vice President’s shoulder with the rounded edge of his boot, made him get up and answer the door.
It only stood to reason that whoever was on the other side of the door had every intention of coming in firing and better they serve up Ruben Iglesias to this mistake. He got up from the nest he had made by the empty fireplace with his wife and three children, two bright-eyed girls and one small boy, whose face was sweaty and red from the work of such deep sleep. The governess, Esmeralda, stayed with them. She was from the north and did not hesitate to glare openly at the terrorists. The Vice President kept looking at the ceiling, afraid that last bullet might have nicked a pipe. That would be a hell of a thing to deal with now. The right side of his face, which changed and grew hourly, was now swollen into a meaty yellow red and his right eye was shut tight. Still the wound bled and bled. Twice he had had to get a new dinner napkin. As a boy, Ruben Iglesias prayed long hours on his knees in the Catholic church that God would grant him the gift of height, a gift He had not seen fit to grant a single member of his extended family. “God will know what to give you,” the priests had told him without a hint of interest, and they were right. Being short had made him the second-most-important man in his government, and now it had very probably saved him from serious injury as the blow had landed more on the strong plane of his skull than the comparatively delicate hinge of his jaw. His face served as a reminder that everything had not gone smoothly the night before, another good message to those outside. When the Vice President stood, stiff and aching, General Benjamin put the slender broomstick of the rifle’s barrel between his shoulder blades and steered him forward. His own condition, always exacerbated by stress, had begun to bloom one tiny pustule at the end of every nerve and he longed for a hot compress almost as much as he longed for revolution. The knock repeated itself.