Ann Patchett by Bel Canto Page B

holding and the
great metallic click stilled them all like a film spliced into one single
frame. And there the room waited, time suspended, until Roxane Coss, without so
much as smoothing her dress or touching her hair, turned to go and stand beside
a painting that was, in all honesty, a minor work.
    After that the Generals began arguing quietly
among themselves and even the foot soldiers, the little bandits, were leaning
in, trying to hear. Their voices blurred together. The word woman was heard and then the words never and agreement . And then one of them said in a voice
that was low and confused, “She could sing.” With their heads together there
was no telling who said it. It may well have been all of them, all of us.
    There were worse reasons to keep a person
hostage. You keep someone always for what he or she is worth to you, for what
you can trade her for, money or freedom or somebody else you want more. Any
person can be a kind of trading chip when you find a way to hold her. So to
hold someone for song, because the thing longed for was the sound of her voice,
wasn’t it all the same? The terrorists, having no chance to get what they came
for, decided to take something else instead, something that they never in their
lives knew that they wanted until they crouched in the low, dark shaft of the
air-conditioning vents: opera. They decided to take that very thing for which
Mr. Hosokawa lived.
    Roxane waited alone against the wall near the
bright, tumbling fruit and cried from frustration. The Generals began to raise
their voices while the rest of the women and then the servants filed out. The
men glowered and the young terrorists kept their weapons raised. The
accompanist, who had momentarily fallen asleep in his chair, roused himself
enough to stand and walked out of the room with the help of the kitchen staff,
never having realized that his companion was now behind him.
    “This is better,” General Benjamin said,
walking a wide circle on the floor that had previously been covered in
hostages. “Now a man can breathe.”
    From inside they could hear the extraneous
hostages being met with great applause and celebration. The bright pop of
camera flashes raised up over the other side of the
garden wall. In the midst of the confusion, the accompanist walked right back
in the front door, which no one had bothered to lock. He threw it open with
such force that it slammed back against the wall, the doorknob leaving a mark
in the wood. They would have shot him but they knew him. “Roxane Coss is not
outside,” he said in Swedish. His voice was thick, his consonants catching
between his teeth. “She is not outside!”
    So slurred was the accompanist’s speech that it
took even Gen a minute to recognize the language. The Swedish he knew was
mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the
subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of
subjects. “She’s here,” Gen said.
    The accompanist’s health seemed temporarily
revived by his fury and for a moment the blood rushed back into his gray
cheeks. “All women are released!” He shook his hands in the air as if he were
trying to rush crows from a cornfield, his quickly blueing lips were bright
with the foam of his spit. Gen relayed the information in Spanish.
    “Christopf, here,” Roxane said, and gave a
small wave as if they had only been briefly separated at a party.
    “Take me instead,” the accompanist howled, his
knees swaying dangerously towards another buckle. It was a delightfully
old-fashioned offer, though every person in the room knew that no one wanted
him and everyone wanted her.
    “Put him outside,” General Alfredo said.
    Two of the boys stepped forward, but the
accompanist, who no one thought was capable of escape in his state of rapid and
mysterious deterioration, darted past them and sat
down hard on the floor beside Roxane Coss. One of the boys pointed his gun
towards the center of