And he thought, Yeah, but she got the girl out of Central America by herself under the gun and brought her all the way here, didn’t she? So leave her alone. Don’t rush her. She knows what she’s doing. Look at her, Jesus, with that movie-star nose and the lower lip he wouldn’t mind biting…
She looked at him just then and Jack said, “My mother’s Aunt Elodie was married to a guy, I never knew him, but his dad was here back in the thirties. He was a building contractor and got the disease, according to my mother’s aunt, from a colored fella that worked for him. She said he had a little cut on his hand, right here. I remember her telling me when I was little. She lived out Esplanade Avenue in a big frame house that was always dark inside. She kept the shades drawn during the day and it smelled old and musty. I picture her, I can smell that house. She believed that was the way you got leprosy, from a colored person. You had to be careful, she said, if you were around them and you had any cuts. I used to think about that old man, her father-in-law… He died the same year I was born. I couldn’t imagine a well-to-do man like that, in New Orleans, having leprosy. Lepers were always natives in Africa or Asia… There was a movie we saw in high school about a leper colony in Burma that I’ll never forget. When I think of lepers now I see those people. I mean they were in the worst shape you can imagine, really awful-looking. Some of ’em, I remember, didn’t have noses.” He paused a moment and said, “But what I remember most was this Italian missionary that ran the place. Guy with a full beard, real long, scraggly, wore a white cassock and a beret. But the thing about him, he was always touching the lepers, no matter how deformed they were. Like he was going out of his way to touch them. Taking hold of the stubs they had for hands, touching their faces…”
Jack paused again. They were on the tree-shaded drive that led to the infirmary building, Sister Lucy’s gaze on the entrance, directly ahead of them.
He said, “You touch them, too, don’t you? Not just the drunks at the soup kitchen, I mean lepers, at the hospital where you worked.”
She came to a stop and turned off the ignition before looking at him with those quietly aware eyes.
“That’s what you do, Jack, you touch people.”
They sat in the hearse parked in the shade of old oak trees while she smoked a cigarette, Jack deciding it was no more weird for a nun than the way she was dressed. She had offered him one, a Kool Filter King. He told her he’d quit three years ago.
“In prison?”
“After I got out. When I was in there I smoked all the time.”
Before lighting up she asked if he’d mind and he thought of Buddy Jeannette in the hotel suite that night his life changed. “You mind if I smoke?” Now wondering if the same thing could be happening with a nun, thinking that in the past week he had seen two old movies on TV where guys were with nuns in strange situations…
She said, “I left you up in the air. I come here and the place overwhelms me.”
“It’s a lot bigger than you think it’s gonna be.”
“What I should remember, it’s also a public health service hospital.”
“Why do you have to remember that?”
“It’s operated by the federal government. Anyone with an in can find out things.”
He said, “Yeah?” and waited.
“You don’t see the connection, do you?”
He said, “We started out you thought I knew things I didn’t. Well, if you’re still under that impression then I’m sorry but I can’t help you. I’m only the driver and I’m not even doing that.” Letting her see some of his irritation. Why not? She was a sister, but she wasn’t going to make him stay after and clean the erasers if he talked back. “You want the colonel to think she’s dead, I can understand that. But why go to all this trouble if he’s busy down in Nicaragua?”
“He isn’t down in Nicaragua,” Sister Lucy said, back to business, her voice quiet, in control. “He’s in New Orleans.”
“Guy’s fighting a war, he drops everything to come after the girl, what’d you say, defiled him?”
“Jack, he was military attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Washington. He came here in ’79, to Miami, when Somoza’s government fell, and we know he was in New Orleans before he went back to Nicaragua. He has friends here. You must know they’re getting all kinds of support from the U.S.” She paused and said, “Don’t you?” Frowning a little. She blew out a stream of smoke and said, “What we know is that the colonel traced us to Mexico and then here. Now he’s here and has inquired about Amelita. He hasn’t sent flowers, Jack, he wants to kill her.”
Listen to the nun. He watched her mash the cigarette in the ashtray and close it.
“There’s a doctor here, on the staff, who spent years in Nicaragua and was a friend of Rudolfo Meza…”
“The one the colonel shot.”
“Murdered. At the time I arrived with Amelita I told him the whole story. So he knew the situation and got in touch with me as soon as he found out the colonel had called, asking about her. Right after that she had a visitor, not the colonel but a Nicaraguan. Sister Teresa Victor told him Amelita was seriously ill and couldn’t see anyone.”
“The whole hospital’s in on it? What we’re doing?”
“No, not administration; some of the staff. I think a few of the doctors and of course the sisters. There won’t be a death certificate. But if anyone inquires the sisters will say they’re not permitted to give out information about the deceased, well, other than she was taken to a funeral home.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Then all you have to do is put a notice in the paper that Amelita Sosa was cremated. She doesn’t know a soul here, so anyone who inquires would have to be the colonel or a friend of his.”
“I put a notice in the paper.”
“Isn’t that what you do? I’ll pay for it.”
“What’re you getting me into?”
She said, “I don’t think there’s the least chance you’ll be in any kind of physical danger.”
“It’s not the physical kind I’m thinking about.”
“Sister Teresa Victor spoke to Mr. Mullen…” But now she didn’t seem too sure about it. “At least she said she did.”
“She told Leo the whole story?”
“Maybe not all the details.”
“Maybe not any of ’em. What you’re talking about here, don’t you think is illegal?”
She said, “A man has vowed to kill an innocent young girl and you want to argue the legality-if I understand you right-of placing a death notice in the paper?”
He liked that, the deadpan delivery. Jack said, “Well, I guess it’s not something you could go to jail over.”
“Who would know?”
He nodded at that. “You’re right.”
She said, “What else can I tell you?”
He thought a moment and said deadpan, giving it back to her, “If you saw the colonel right now, would you touch him?”
With just the barest trace of a smile she said, “You’re having a good time, aren’t you?”
“It’s different,” Jack said, with the same hint of a smile. “What’s the guy’s name, the colonel?”
“Dagoberto Godoy.”
“Is he kinda fat and has a little thin mustache?”
“He has a mustache, but he’s trim, you might say good-looking.”
Jack said, “Oh.”
He brought Amelita Sosa out in a plastic body bag on a wheeled mortuary cot, past empty cars parked along the back of the infirmary building, to the hearse standing in the sun, its rear door open. With the cot touching the step plate he squeezed the handles to collapse the front legs first, then the rear legs as he slipped the cot into the hearse, pushed down the lock button on the door, and closed it firmly.
Jack glanced over at Sister Lucy in her Calvins and heels talking to the doctor who had been in Nicaragua and two Daughters of Charity, the little bowlegged one Sister Teresa Victor, who had been here about fifty years. Jack stood for several moments looking off, hands clasped behind his dark suit in a patient funeral director’s pose, thinking that was quite an attractive girl he’d helped into the body bag, not like any leper he had ever seen in pictures. He had touched her zipping up the bag, making sure the zipper didn’t get snagged in her flowery shirt. He hadn’t noticed any brown spots on her face or arms. He gave Sister Lucy another look before strolling up to the driver’s side of the hearse and getting in. By the time he’d started the engine and revved it a couple of times the passenger side door opened and Sister Lucy got in.