Ghost Dancer Read online

  In his spare time—and he had nothing but spare time—he made a chess set out of shotgun shells, plumbing supplies, and empty medicine bottles. It was ugly, but it worked. Kate was too tired in the evenings to take the game seriously, but since it was the only game in town—literally—they played nearly every night.

  And as they played, they talked. He learned about her childhood in Ireland, her boyfriends at Oxford, and her love of medicine. As for Africa? “Where else can I deliver babies one day, and the next, treat guinea worm, gunshot wounds, and AIDS—not to mention the likes of you!”

  He admired her clarity. His own situation was more ambiguous, and even embarrassing. Though only thirty, he’d spent most of his adult life traveling around the world, “taking pictures in all the wrong places.” That was the only way to get published if you weren’t known: You went where others wouldn’t go. To cities like Grozny and Algiers, Monrovia and Port-au-Prince. The kinds of places where the best hotel in town was the one with the most sandbags.

  He was working with the F-Stop Cooperative in New York, and most of the time he loved it. The life. The people. The pictures. Flying in and out of places. Just being there. You get off a plane in a city like Algiers, and everything snaps into focus. Just like that—right there, right then! Be here now. It was a great way to get “centered,” because if you didn’t, you wound up in an orange jumpsuit with a knife at your throat.

  So it’s like being one of those divers, she teased.

  What divers?

  The ones in Acapulco who jump off the cliffs.

  He shook his head. I’m not a cowboy, he told her. It’s not just the bang-bang.

  Ri-iighhht.

  No, really! He’d worked as a reporter, and writing just wasn’t the same. Whatever you wrote, it was never quite right. There was always someone you hadn’t interviewed, or something you didn’t quite grasp. Photography wasn’t like that. A picture was a fact in a way that words on a page could never be.

  Burke told Kate how he’d gotten started on a weekly newspaper in Virginia. The paper wasn’t unionized, so he’d worn a lot of hats: writing articles and editorials, taking pictures and doing page layouts. There was a police scanner in a corner of the office, buzzing and crackling, diodes gleaming. Word of a fire, a shooting, a crash, and he was out the door with his cameras.

  How exciting, she yawned. A crash.

  Well, yeah, it was! A lot of the time, Burke told her, he rode shotgun with the newspaper’s main photographer, an older guy named Sal, who said things like, “Never go anywhere unless you’re strapped.” He meant with a camera.

  So you’re always ready to take a picture.

  Well, yeah, Burke said, but it’s not just that. The real point is that having a camera with you—even a small camera—changes you.

  Changes you?

  He nodded. Makes you braver, he said.

  How?

  If you have a camera, you want to get the picture. So you stand your ground. Most people won’t do that. They see people running, screaming, they head the other way—it’s instinct—but a good photographer stays where he is. He waits for the image.

  And if “the image” is a tidal wave?

  Burke laughed. It helps to be a good swimmer. But he’d always had second thoughts about photography. Though he’d won a boxful of awards, and covered everything from a gypsy wedding in Siberia to the dragon-boat races in Macao, most of his work revolved around mayhem. An earthquake in Turkey, a mass grave in Kosovo, a beheading in Chop Square. After a while, you got used to havoc. It began to seem almost normal.

  And that couldn’t be good for your soul, Burke thought. It was one thing to be an accidental witness, someone who just happened upon a scene, and quite another to stick a camera in a dying man’s face—as he had done on more than one occasion. There was something shameful about taking a picture like that. It made you complicit in the mayhem.

  Sounds like bad karma, Kate told him.

  Burke smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “something like that.”

  Chess wasn’t their only diversion. There was an alfresco theater, of sorts, in the ruins and weeds of what used to be the post office. Each Friday night, a dozen metal chairs were unfolded and deployed before a badly damaged wall of whitewashed cinder blocks. An antique 8mm film projector sputtered to life, casting its spell along a beam of light, flickering with the vectors of moths and flying beetles. In the second month of Burke’s sojourn in Porkpa, he and Kate paid half a euro each to see Richard Burton in The Robe, John Wayne in Hatari!, and Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  Where the films came from was a mystery.

  What was not a mystery was the attraction that he and Kate began to feel for each other. Maybe it was inevitable. They were young. It was Africa. After the Michael Rennie movie, they made out like a couple of kids, sitting on a couch at the clinic. It only lasted a minute or two, then Kate pushed him away and, with a sly smile, suggested they go to bed.

  But not with each other. She needed time to think, she said, then kissed him on the cheek, and left the room, slyly humming. It took him a while to recognize the song. “Just One of Those Things.”

  Which was funny, but inaccurate. Whatever it was between them—love, lust, or loneliness—it wasn’t “one of those things.” It was a different “thing” entirely. He was going to tell her that when the unthinkable happened.

  They were “rescued.”

  Or he was. Kate was upriver delivering a baby when a UN convoy rolled into Porkpa, escorting a truck with a red crescent on its side. Pulling up to the clinic in an armored personnel carrier, a Nigerian captain jumped to the ground, and promptly announced that everyone was being evacuated.

  “Everyone?” Burke eyed the little truck.

  “Yes,” the captain insisted. “All the white people. Everyone!”

  Burke thanked him for his trouble, but declined the invitation, only to be told that it wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. An argument ensued. Burke stood his ground. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not without the doctor.

  He woke up half an hour later on the floor of the truck, his wrists bound with FlexiCuffs. Driven to the airstrip at Belle Yella, he was put aboard a UN helicopter with other evacuees, and flown to an American naval ship that was standing off the coast. Two days later, he was in Washington.

  His apartment was a one-bedroom co-op on Connecticut Avenue, a couple of blocks north of the zoo. There was nothing special about it except that, in the morning, he could hear the gibbons singing above the traffic. It was never a place in which he’d spent a lot of time, but it was an address, at least, and it was where he kept his books and clothes.

  He tried to get in touch with Kate, but there wasn’t any way. The shortwave was down, and her e-mail came back as undeliverable. There didn’t seem to be an Irish embassy in Monrovia. She might as well have been on the moon.

  What did she think had happened to him? Did anyone tell her? Did she think he’d caught the first ride out, leaving without a word? That’s the way it must have seemed…

  There was a number for Doctors Without Borders in New York, and he called it. They referred him to the Paris headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières. In his best high school French, he asked about the clinic in Porkpa.

  C’est fermé.

  Et la directeur?

  His accent must have been execrable, because the person at the other end of the line sounded pained: It is okay to speak English, please?

  Absolutely! You were saying: The clinic’s closed.

  Yes, it is closed.

  And I was asking about the director. Dr. Aherne.

  She is no longer with us.

  Burke froze. What?

  Yes! I am afraid it is no longer possible to work in Liberia. It is too dangerous.

  Oh… he began to breathe again. Do you have a phone number for her?

  Yes, but I am afraid it is confidential. Perhaps, if you like, we could forward a letter?

  He wrote the lette
r that same afternoon, and tore it up that evening. In the morning, he sat down with it for a second time. But there was so much to say, so much to explain. Not about his disappearance. That was the easy part. The hard part was talking about them. The two of them.

  What about them? When he thought about Africa, and all the things that happened there, the memories were like hallucinations. The helicopter yawing as its rotors came apart. The ground rushing toward him. The little blanket of bees on his chest. Kate.

  In the end, the letter was as much to himself as it was to her. It went on for pages and days as he came to grips, not only with his feelings for Kate but with the uncertainties of his own identity. Who was he? Who did he want to be? What was important? What was not? The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the answers rested with Kate.

  By then, he’d cold-called all the hospitals in Dublin. Did they have a Dr. Aherne working for them? Indeed, they did. They had Ahernes and Ahearns. Orthopedics, pediatrics, and family medicine. Mary, Rory, and Declan. Which one did he have in mind?

  It was at Meath Street Hospital that he found her. The hospital’s new directory listed Katherine Aherne as a physician in the Casualty Ward. But she wasn’t to start for a week or two, and when she did, the receptionist said, she’d probably work nights and weekends. “That’s how we break them in,” she confided.

  In a way, he was relieved not to be able to reach her. There was too much to say, and what if she hung up on him? At least, with the letter, he could say what he felt. And he would, just as soon as he got it right.

  In the meantime, he had plastic surgery at Sibley Hospital. There wasn’t anything to be done about the splashes of scar tissue on his chest and shoulders, but the doctors were able to make his ear, or what was left of it, “cosmetically acceptable.”

  It was a strange time. He began to work out at the Y, lifting weights and playing basketball in the mornings. Most afternoons, he read the paper over coffee at a sidewalk table outside Foster Brothers, or wandered through the city’s museums. There was a poker game on Thursday nights at James McLeod’s place, but that was all the “socializing” that he did.

  By now, word had gotten out that he was back, and editors were calling. F-Stop had a commercial assignment for the Patagonia catalog: a three-day trek through Chile’s Torres del Paine. Was he interested? He thought it over for about an hour. Then he caught a plane.

  That night, he lay awake in a window seat, gazing into the darkness of the Atlantic, miles below. In the morning, he changed planes at Heathrow, and flew on to Dublin in the afternoon. Reeling with jet lag, he took a room at an expensive hotel on Grafton Street, and dropped into bed. When he awoke five hours later, he went to Meath Street Hospital and took a seat in the waiting room on the Casualty Ward.

  The next night, he did the same. And the next. And the next. Eventually, one of the nurses took pity on him, and let drop the information that Dr. Aherne lived in Dalkey. “Like Bono,” she said.

  It was easy to find her after that, but it took a weekend to sort things out, and another week to court her. Two weeks after that, they were married.

  The old man gave her away. He liked Americans in general and Burke in particular, not least of all because Burke was content to stay in Dublin for as long as Kate wanted to be there. Soon, Burke was working at “the Firm,” helping the old man with incorporations. Within a year, Kate was running the Casualty Ward at the hospital, and life was grand. They began to talk about a baby.

  Then the sepsis.

  CHAPTER 7

  When Kate died…

  The old man just stopped coming in. After a while, the bookkeeper left to take a job with a software start-up in Rathmines. Then Fiona, the nineteen-year-old Goth receptionist, drifted off in the direction of Ibiza, leaving Burke by himself in a suite of offices that the old man no longer visited or cared about.

  It can’t go on like this, Burke told himself. Not with the old man drinking the way he is, sitting alone in that haunted house with too many stairs and too many memories. Not with the firm making so little money. And not, Burke thought, not with me treading the days as if they were water.

  The truth was: Kate was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back. That was a fact.

  But it wasn’t just a fact. It was a circumstance so massive as to constitute its own dimension. For Burke and the old man, Kate’s absence was their longitude and latitude, intangible as space, but just as real—and just as empty. And maybe, for the old man, it was something more. A black hole, pulling him in.

  A puff of rain hit the window.

  Burke blinked. His reverie dissolved. In the street below, a taxi pulled away from the curb, leaving a man on the corner, stranded in the drizzle. The man was looking around, as if to get his bearings. D’Anconia, Burke thought. Must be him.

  Leaving the window, he sat down at the antique wooden desk that, technically, was the old man’s. The necessary forms were in an envelope on the blotter. At the edge of the desk was a silver-framed photograph of Kate. Dressed in her surgical scrubs, she stood in a puddle of mud, smoking a cigarette at the entrance to the clinic in Porkpa.

  Burke listened for d’Anconia’s footsteps on the stairs, but he heard none. Then a soft knock trembled the doors.

  “Come in.” Burke got to his feet, half expecting Peter Lorre.

  But his visitor was nothing like that. Only a few years older than Burke himself, d’Anconia was handsome enough to be someone’s leading man. His hair was long and black, swept back in a way that seemed artfully disarranged. Square jaw, white teeth, strong nose, olive complexion, and just enough stubble on his cheeks to make it seem as if he didn’t care about appearances. But the Borsalino hat gave the lie to that, as did the cashmere coat and bright scarf.

  “Francisco d’Anconia,” his visitor announced, and closed the door behind him.

  They shook hands. “Mike Burke. Can I get you something?”

  D’Anconia dropped into a wing chair beside the desk, brushed the rain from his hat, and laid it in his lap. “No, thanks,” he said. He glanced around, then nodded to a cluster of photographs on the wall. “Nice pictures.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You take them?”

  Burke nodded.

  D’Anconia cocked his head. “What about that one?” he asked, pointing to a photograph of a spectacular ravine whose mist-ridden slopes converged in a jumble of boulders to form a channel through which a wild river ran.

  Burke answered without having to look. “Tsangpo Gorge.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Tibet.”

  D’Anconia removed a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of his coat, and tapped it against his wrist. “One of the things I like about Europe,” he said. “A guy can smoke.” He paused. Lit up. Exhaled. And frowned. “I was expecting what’s-his-name. The guy on the plaque. Aherne.”

  A wince of regret from Burke. “Tommy’s not well,” he said. “He’s not what you’d call ‘a young man.’”

  D’Anconia’s brow sunk into a V. “So you’re…what?”

  Burke pushed a business card across the desk. “An ‘associate.’”

  “I don’t mean that,” d’Anconia said. “I mean, you sound American.”

  “I am. Dual citizenship.”

  “And how does that work?”

  “My grandfather was a Connemara man.”

  “And that makes you Irish?” d’Anconia asked.

  Burke shrugged. “You have to apply, but it’s pretty much automatic. And my wife was Irish, so…” He changed the subject, “And what about you? Have you been here long?”

  “No. Just got in.”

  “Ah, but you’ll be here for a while! You’ve business in Dublin.”

  D’Anconia shook his head. “Not really. It’s just a connecting flight. I’m out of here in the morning.”

  “Then I guess we’d better get to work.” Reaching for the envelope and forms, Burke unwound a length of string that bound the flap of the envelope
to a paper disk on the back. “Y’know, I never asked how you found us. The old man will want to know.”

  “The old man?”

  “Mr. Aherne.”

  D’Anconia grunted. “I saw an ad. The Aer Lingus magazine. It was in one of the classifieds.”

  “Oh, ri-iight! The classifieds! Well, I’m glad to know something’s come of that,” Burke confessed. “Because they’re damned expensive.” Removing the forms from the envelope on his desk, he laid them out between them.

  “What happened to your ear?”

  Coming out of nowhere, so unexpectedly, the question made Burke smile. It was like a child’s question. “I was in a crash,” he said.

  “What kind of crash?”

  “Helicopter. There was a lot of fuel flying around.” He made a gesture with his right hand, tossing it out as if he were sowing seeds. “I got burned.”

  “You must have had a good surgeon,” d’Anconia said. “You have to look twice to notice anything.”

  Burke again changed the subject. “When we spoke on the phone, I think you said confidentiality was key.”

  D’Anconia nodded.

  “In that case,” Burke said, “a limited liability corporation is what you want. With an Isle of Man venue.”

  “Isle of Man?” d’Anconia asked.

  “It’s in the Irish Sea. Oldest legislature in the world. Pretty place. Very historical.”

  “But it’s English, right?”

  Burke tilted his head from side to side. “It’s a sovereign state, but the U.K. handles its defense and foreign affairs.”

  A ripple of suspicion flickered in d’Anconia’s eyes. “I thought the idea was to form an Irish corporation. When we talked on the phone, I assumed—”

  “If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do,” Burke told him. “But if it’s confidentiality that you’re after, then it’s the Isle of Man you want. Not Ireland.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Burke explained, “unlike the Irish, the Manx don’t require disclosure of a corporation’s ‘beneficial owner.’ Which is about as discreet as it gets, because people can’t disclose what they don’t know.”