Prospero's Daughter. Elizabeth Nunez

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СКАЧАТЬ finish. “Do you take me for an idiot, Inspector? I know how to guard my daughter’s honor.”

      “But when you were in the garden, sir. Were there times they could have been alone?”

      “I resent these insinuations, Inspector.”

      “I am sorry, sir. It’s my job, sir. I must ask. The commissioner will expect me to ask.”

      Gardner’s hand tightened around the back of his neck, and his head fell on his shoulders. With infinite patience, as if he were speaking to a child, he said, “When I was not with them, Inspector, Ariana was always there. She was my spy.”

      * * *

      From the moment Gardner opened the back door in the kitchen, Mumsford was accosted by the stench. It came on the first wave of heat that, after the cool of the interior, felt like a blast from a blowtorch on his face. The combination of heat and foul odor almost knocked him off of his feet. His knees buckled and his head felt light. It was shit: cow shit, dog shit, pig shit. It stank as if the sun had vaporized all the shit in the world into the very particles of the air he breathed. He put his handkerchief to his nose, but even the cologne he had dampened it with that morning could not mask the stench. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and goose bumps ran down the length of his arms.

      “Stink, isn’t it?” Gardner said, smirking.

      In front of them it was green, an immaculate plastic lawn that had recently been cut, or, as the discomforting thought snaked its way into Mumsford’s consciousness, had never needed cutting, stretching out to a chain-link fence behind which the bush grew tall and wild. There was no animal in sight, no mound of shit anywhere.

      “Where?” Mumsford looked over the handkerchief he held plastered to his nose and mouth.

      Gardner grinned and motioned him to follow him.

      What registered first in Mumsford’s brain when they turned the corner was color, a mirage of color. He saw color first because the sun dazzled him, because here, on this side of the house, there was not a sliver of green, no grass, no trees, just dry, brown dirt and beds of gray pebbles; because when he squinted to protect his eyes from the glare, it was the macabre shimmering of color that arrested him; because though he could not have missed the chain-link fence enclosing a tiny area behind the color and the outlines of the man inside, it was easier, less painful, to focus on the color.

      “My orchids,” Gardner said.

      Never in all his years of police work had Mumsford seen a sight more terrible. Never had he smelled a stench more foul.

      “They are my pride and joy,” Gardner said.

      The mirage cleared and the outlines took shape. A young man—Mumsford guessed he was about seventeen; seventeen it would be exactly, for Carlos Codrington was two years older than the girl—was sitting on a rock in the scorching sun, penned in an area hardly more than six feet by six. In front of him were Gardner’s orchids, a blaze of purple, pink, and white flowers springing out from a maze of brown roots clinging crablike to gray stumps of coconut tree trunks cut in half and sunk into beds of gravel.

      “My prizewinners.” Gardner was beaming.

      Mumsford’s throat burned, nausea mounted his upper chest. Except for black boxer shorts, the man was naked, his torso, his arms, thighs, and legs bare and blanketed with red bumps. Some of the bumps had turned into sores, and Mumsford could see blood seeping slowly out of them. Some were already pustulant. At his feet, on one side of the base of the rock, was a pool of putrid water, on the other mounds of foul-smelling brown dirt Mumsford was certain was excrement. Mosquitoes buzzed around the water, in and out of the excrement, and lit upon the young man in clusters on his face and over his body. The young man did not move. He did not swat them away. He sat still as a statue, his hands clutched to his knees, his head bent. Only when Gardner approached did he give any sign of life. He must have heard the gravel crunch and when the sounds stopped, he raised his head.

      “I’ve brought the police,” Gardner said.

      The young man looked at him with hatred in his eyes purer than any Mumsford could ever have imagined.

      “He is filth,” Gardner said.

      Mumsford turned away in horror. “Get him out of here! Now!” he shouted at Gardner.

      Gardner smiled cruelly. “A lying slave whom stripes may move, not kindness.”

      “You have not beaten him?” Mumsford glanced quickly at the young man.

      “The cat-o’-nine-tails for what he did to my daughter.”

      “You have not struck him?” Mumsford asked again.

      “No, I have been kind to him, filth that he is.”

      “Clean him up,” Mumsford said. Nausea clogged his throat.

      “He deserves worse than a prison.”

      “Now, Dr. Gardner! I say now! Take him out of there!”

      “I put him there on that rock for endangering the honor of my child.” Gardner curled his lips.

      “Clean him up, I say, Dr. Gardner!”

      “People the island with Carloses, eh?” Gardner taunted Carlos. “Let’s see you people now.”

      “Enough, Dr. Gardner. Get him ready. I will take him now.”

      Gardner came closer to the fence. “Filth,” he shouted.

      “For God’s sake, Dr. Gardner, he is harmless now. Leave him be.”

      Gardner curled his fingers around the loops at the top of the fence. His chest was pumping up and down. “Worse than filth,” he shouted.

      “The commissioner will handle the situation,” Mumsford said. “I will take him to Trinidad.”

      “To jail,” Gardner said.

      “The commissioner will know what to do.” Mumsford tugged Gardner’s arm.

      “You’re a lucky boy.” Gardner shook his finger at Carlos. “If the inspector had not come . . .”

      Mumsford pulled his arm harder and with a parting curse to Carlos, Gardner let go of the fence.

      At least, Mumsford thought, Carlos had not been beaten. At least he had seen no evidence of stripes on his body, only sores.

      Inside the house, Gardner shouted orders at Ariana. “Clean him up! See he takes his things with him. I want nothing of his left here.”

      He invited Mumsford to wait in the drawing room, but Mumsford declined. He was not prepared to call Gardner a torturer, but he could not bear to stay a minute more in his presence, tempting though it was to sit in the cool of the air-conditioned room. He mumbled something about needing to get on his way and said he would wait on the porch.

      The boy had been tortured. When he replayed Gardner’s words, he thought tortured for nothing. His better self, his English self, his more noble self, told him that. For nothing. For expressing a wish, a desire.

      Did СКАЧАТЬ