Chapter 3 Terms Of Surrender

Friday, August 22 - Sunday, August 24, 1975. The Miami River.

The Maribel was tied up at a crumbling dock beneath the Brickell Avenue bridge, between a fish house that smelled like the end of the world and a salvage yard full of other people's ruin. Solange found it at nine on Friday night, after three wrong turns and one unpleasant encounter with a dog.

She was not dressed for it. She had changed out of the navy suit into slacks and a plain white blouse, and she walked the length of the dock with her handbag clutched against her ribs, past stacks of crab traps and coils of rope thick as her arm, into a pool of yellow lamplight where a big man sat on an upturned bucket, eating sardines from a tin with a pocketknife.

"Mr. Marsh."

He did not look up. "You came to yell at me again?"

"I came to make you an offer."

"I've had a lot of those today." He stabbed a sardine. "A man from Crane Holdings came by at noon, very polite, offering me two hundred thousand dollars cash to sign a paper saying I'd never contest the will. Preston's lawyer called at three, offering three. At fivethe bank called to tell me my note on this boat is due Monday, and the bank was suddenly very serious." He finally looked up. "What's yours?"

Solange had practiced her speech in the car. It evaporated now.

"I think," she said carefully, "zat you must marry."

A silence.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The clause." She stepped onto the deck of the tug, uninvited, and the boat rocked gently. "Ninety days. A lawful wife. One year. This is a simple legal condition. It is not a love. Zere is nothing in the will that says it must be a love."

He stared at her. Behind him, on the wheelhouse step, Lola Vega, who had pretended to be asleep, abruptly sat up.

"Madre de Dios," Lola said.

"You're serious."

"I am a paralegal. I am always serious."

"And you've got a candidate for this wife."

Solange held her breath, and then let it go. "Yes."

Gideon Marsh put down his pocketknife.

It took them two hours, a pot of Lola's cafecito, and a legal pad. Solange had thought it through in a way that surprised even her. She did not tell him about the forged clause, or the stolen steno pad, or the ledger in her wardrobe. Those were weapons, and she did not yet know whether he could be trusted with a weapon. She told him only what a paralegal would.

"A marriage must be real in law. Not in the heart. You have a license, two witnesses, a judge or a minister. You live in the same house. You are Mr. and Mrs. Marsh. After one year, you may divorce. Florida has a no-fault law since 1971."

"And what do you get out of it?"

"Money." She did not flinch. "Sixty thousand dollars, in installments. My mother's house, which has a mortgage, paid in full. And-" Her voice caught, and she smoothed it. "My uncle. The Crane lawyers sponsor him. They file an affidavit with the immigration judge. They claim he is a refugee of conscience. Mr. Crane's name is a weight on thosescales. It could get him out of the Dade County stockade."

"Your uncle's the man in the gray suit."

"Yes."

"And Crane Holdings will do that for you."

"Crane Holdings will do it for you. You will be their chief executive officer." She lifted her chin. "I have drawn a contract."

She produced it from her handbag, six typed pages with a carbon, and laid it on the bucket between them like a card on a table.

Gideon read it by the lamp. He read slowly, the way a man reads who has been cheated before. Lola read over his shoulder, her lips moving, her cigar going out.

1. The Parties shall marry on or before the 29th day of August, 1975.

4. The Parties shall maintain separate bedchambers.

7. Public displays of affection shall be limited to occasions on which they are reasonably required.

11. On the 366th day after the marriage, the Parties shall petition for dissolution.

14. Neither Party shall fall in love with the other. Should this occur, the Party so afflicted shall give written notice, and the contract shall terminate without penalty.

"Fourteen," Gideon said slowly.

"I thought it prudent."

"Prudent." He looked up. In the lamplight his eyes were the color of wet slate, and there was something almost like humor in them. "You thought it was likely."

"I thought it was possible. With a man of your temperament, one cannot rule out an accident."

Lola made a noise in her throat that might have been a laugh, and might have been a

stifled cry.

"My temperament."

"You shout at dock workers. You call a woman lady in a tone of voice that is not a compliment. You eat sardines from a tin."

"They're good sardines."

"They are terrible sardines." But she was almost smiling now, and then, to her horror,she was, and then so was he, a wide, startled, unwilling grin that took ten years from his face and made her stomach do something she did not care to examine.

She looked away.

On Saturday morning she went home to Lemon City and told her mother.

The house on Northeast Fifty-fifth Street was a low white bungalow with a mango tree in the yard and a sewing machine in the front window. Mireille Pierre-Louis was a small woman with an enormous voice, a seamstress by trade and a general by temperament, and she took the news standing up, a pincushion strapped to her wrist, a half-finished wedding gown draped over her arm, which was the cruelest coincidence imaginable.

"No."

"Maman-"

"You will marry an American for money. A man you do not love. A man you have known

three days."

"Four."

"Four." Mireille threw up her hands. The gown flapped. "Your father is turning in his grave."

"My father," Solange said, very quietly, "is the reason I am doing it."

The room went still. The sewing machine ticked as it cooled. From the back bedroom herbrother Lucien, sixteen, all legs and elbows and ham-radio earphones, peered out into the hall.

"What's going on?"

"Your sister has lost her mind."

"Cool," said Lucien.

Solange took her mother's hands. They were small and hard, the hands of a woman who had stitched her way across an ocean. "Maman. They have Oncle Rodolphe in the stockade. In six weeks they will send him back to Port-au-Prince. You know what mhappens there to a man with his papers. Zis is the only door I have found. I will go

through it."

"And the man?"

"He is not a good man or a bad man. He is a tired man. He is honest, I think." Shehesitated. "He rescued a stranger from the sea on Tuesday night. He did not have to."

"A white man?"

"Maman."

"I am only asking."

"No. He is not white. He is..." Solange searched for it. "He is what the Americans call nothing in particular. Zis is what makes him dangerous. He has never had a family. He does not know what it costs when it is taken."

Mireille looked at her daughter for a long, long minute. Then she put the wedding gown down on the table, smoothed it flat with one hand, and said, in French, in the voice she had used the night they left Port-au-Prince:

"Then I will make your dress. But you will not wear white. You will wear blue, like the sea you came across."

On Sunday night Gideon came to the house.

He wore the borrowed sport coat and carried a paper-wrapped bouquet of grocery-store carnations, and he looked as though he were walking toward a firing squad. He ate Mireille's griot and plantains in silence while she watched him over the rim of her coffee cup, and he praised the food with such awkward sincerity that Lucien snorted into his napkin.

He was halfway through the second helping when the telephone rang.

Mireille answered. She listened. She said, "Oui. Yes. One moment," and held it out to Solange, her face gone gray.

"It is a man. He will not give his name."

Solange took the receiver. A voice she did not know, soft, courteous, with the polished French of Port-au-Prince and an American accent laid over it like gloss over wood, said:

"Mademoiselle Pierre-Louis. I hear congratulations are in order."

"Who is this?"

"A friend of your uncle's. A friend of your late father's. I have only a small request, mademoiselle." A pause. "The tin pouch. You will bring it to a certain person by Wednesday noon, and no one will have to be disappointed."

Her knees went weak. Gideon was already out of his chair. She waved him back, mouthing no, no, and said into the phone, in a voice she barely recognized as her own: "I do not know what you mean."

"Of course you don't." A small, regretful laugh. "But I am obliged to tell you, mademoiselle, so that you will understand how seriously we take this: it is very important to look out of your window."

The line clicked and went dead.

"Solange?" said Gideon.

She walked, stiffly, to the front window and drew back the curtain.

The street was empty, the mango tree black against the streetlamp. But out beyond the hedge, across the road, a small silver camera flash popped once in the dark, then twice, and a figure in a pale linen suit turned and walked unhurriedly away.