Bel Canto(28)

“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.

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.