She squinted against the sun’s glare and scanned the horizon. Guantanamo Bay was a forty-five-mile expanse of desert, a rugged terrain of hills and mudflats punctuated by cacti and palm trees. But just beyond the sun-drenched landscape, the turquoise waters of the Caribbean Sea undulated across the horizon, the waves crashing to shore in a cascade of white foam. The water beckoned with an almost irresistible force. Two hundred and ten miles away, Haitians were heeding the call. Thousands were taking to the sea in rickety wooden contraptions masquerading as boats.
Boat people, that’s what Adam Hartmann had called them. She should have punched him in the throat when she had the chance.
An old memory teased at her. She was a gap-toothed third grader at PS 193 in Brooklyn. Coke-bottle glasses hid her earnest brown eyes, and two fat braids fell neatly down her back. The school bell rang, signaling an end to her daily reprieve.
She went tearing out of the school yard, her stubby legs pumping hard, braids bouncing haphazardly in the wind. She ran down Avenue L with its two-story houses and their tidy little yards. Across Ocean Avenue with its looming high-rise apartment buildings. Past Brooklyn College. Past the small park where the youngbloods smoked weed and pounded out endless games of checkers waiting for their beepers to go off. She kept running, her breath coming in sharp gasps, heart pounding an offbeat rhythm in her chest.
She was too slow. She was always too slow.
Most days, she made it to the corner of Flatbush Avenue before her nemesis struck. Mark Washington was the worst of bullies. A beefy fifth grader with a scar over his left brow that he supposedly got from fighting a teacher, Mark chose a new victim to torment at the beginning of every school year. It was her turn.
He hid in the stand of trees lining Flatbush Avenue and leaped out, screaming, “Go back to the banana boat, Frenchie!” He doubled over with laughter as the tears streamed down her cheeks.
No amount of reasoning worked on Mark. She had even smuggled her birth certificate to school one day and thrust it in his face, proving she had been born at Kings County Hospital in East Flatbush.
“I’m an American,” she insisted.
“You just got off the banana boat, Frenchie.”
For Mark, the analysis was simple: her parents were Haitian, so that made her one of the “boat people.” Nothing she said or did would change his mind.
“You ready, ma’am?” a voice interjected.
She hadn’t thought about her old life in Brooklyn for years. She had fled that world for a new life in Boston. The helpless young girl she had once been was long dead.
“Ma’am?” The voice was more insistent this time.
She looked up, startled to find her military escort less than an arm’s length away. “Yes, I’m ready,” she hastily replied.
Petty Officer John Wilkes pointed to a jeep parked just a few feet away. “After you, ma’am.”
“Can we walk?” she asked. “I’d love to stretch my legs.”
He gave her an assessing look before peering thoughtfully over her left shoulder. “Chow hall’s not too far,” he conceded.
They walked along the airfield, Renée wiping impatiently at the beads of sweat on her forehead.
“Is it always this hot?” she asked, glancing at her companion.
Despite the pale skin that went with his red hair, Petty Officer Wilkes seemed impervious to the heat. His uniform—a long-sleeved khaki shirt and sharply creased trousers—was as crisp now as it had been when he’d picked her up at the ferry landing a few hours earlier.
“No,” Petty Officer Wilkes grunted. He waited a moment, then grudgingly added, “We got us a heat wave.”
He was not a talkative man, but she kept trying. She could use an ally. “It was thirty degrees and snowing when I left Boston this morning. It feels strange to be in a heat wave.”
“You from Boston?” His gaze visibly softened. “Me too.”
So they did have something in common. She decided to press the advantage. “Where?”
“Dorchester.”
“Do you miss it?”
He nodded. “Miss my mom, but I’m lucky to have my wife and kids on this deployment.”
She gave him a startled look. “Your family is here?”
For the first time, he smiled. “GTMO is not as bad as you think. We got pretty much everything you’d expect from a small town in America. A golf course, bowling alley, even a McDonald’s. The local school’s pretty good too. And we got zero crime.”
It was hard to think of Guantanamo as just another Mayberry, USA. For one thing, most small towns in America were not surrounded by 17.4 miles of steel and razor wire, on the other side of which lay their sworn enemy.
“Don’t you get island fever?” she asked. “This place is tiny.”
“Thirty-one miles of usable land, mostly on the coastline. It’s not Boston, but I keep busy when I’m not on duty.”
“Doing what?”
He glanced at her almost shyly. “Directing a play,” he mumbled.
“A play?” She wondered if she’d heard him correctly.
He blushed. “It’s called A Few Good Men. Takes place right here on GTMO. They’re supposed to be making a big Hollywood movie about it.”
“I saw it a few years ago.” Paul had taken her for one of their date nights—back when they were still working on their marriage.
Officer Wilkes stopped in his tracks. “You saw the play?”
She faltered, staring warily at him. “It was good.”
“You think you could . . .” He paused, clearing his throat. “I mean, any chance you’d come to one of our rehearsals? I could use the help.”
“Well, I—” She didn’t know a thing about acting or directing, and it had been a while since she’d seen the play, but she could hardly turn down the chance to create an ally in John Wilkes. “I’d be happy to come,” she finally said.
He let out a breath. “Thank you.”
They started walking again, and now she felt comfortable enough to ask the question that had been dogging her since her arrival on the island. “What are all those lines for?”
He didn’t need to ask what she was talking about. Though they were contained behind a large metal fence topped by razor wire, it was impossible to miss the crowd of people stretching to the horizon line. They drooped beneath the sun’s glare like a parched bouquet. Some wrapped damp towels around their heads for a bit of relief from the heat. Others fanned themselves with a small, hopeless wave of the hand, crumbled bits of newspaper, a sodden white handkerchief.
He threw a cursory glance over his shoulder, then shrugged. “They’re waiting on their appropriations, ma’am. Soap, towels, toilet tissue, and rations—that sort of thing.”
“They” were the approximately two thousand Haitian refugees the coast guard had plucked from the ocean and deposited on Guantanamo. They were milling around a large field of beige canvas tents that provided little cover from the sun.
“It must be ninety-five in the shade,” she said, turning her palms up as if to measure the heat. “Surely it’s too hot to be standing out here like this?”
He stiffened. “We’re doing our best, ma’am. Didn’t have much time to prepare. Most of us missed Christmas with our families to build this camp.”
“I understand,” she replied, “but is there a way to dispense supplies in each tent rather than having people stand around waiting?”
“We’re not aid workers,” he snapped. “We’re soldiers. They told us to give humanitarian relief to these people, so that’s what we’re doing.”
“What I meant was—”
An officer walked by, his dress whites practically gleaming in the sunlight. Petty Officer Wilkes clicked his heels and saluted his superior. “Honor bound, sir.”
“To defend freedom, sailor,” the officer replied, saluting smartly in return.
She looked on the exchange in silence, having learned one thing for sure. Guantanamo was no Mayberry.
CHAPTER FOU
R
The Pearl of the Antilles
Welcome to the Pearl of the Antilles. I hope your room is satisfactory?” The bellhop’s rolling Jamaican accent lent a melodious cheer to the words as he carried Renée’s suitcase into the hotel room.
He was a talker. In the ten minutes since check-in, Renée learned his name was Eric, and he was one of the roughly one thousand foreign workers on Guantanamo. They came on temporary contracts—mainly from Jamaica and the Philippines—to work service jobs on the island. Eric hoped to save enough money to pay his medical school tuition back home.
Renée followed him inside, her gaze skimming past the broken armoire, the mismatched desk and chair, and the full-size bed squatting in the middle of the room. A thin layer of dust covered every surface, and a musty odor made her nose twitch. This was the Pearl of the Antilles?
“It’s fine,” she said, laying her briefcase on the battered desk while Eric opened the windows, chatting incessantly as he went.
“The heat has been very bad these last few days. There’s no air-conditioning, but you do have this.” He turned on an enormous but ancient fan, filling the room with a metallic whine that set her teeth on edge.
“I’ll be okay.” She discreetly palmed a ten-dollar bill and handed it to Eric, who flashed her a wide, toothsome smile before making his exit.
Alone at last. She hadn’t been left to herself since her arrival earlier that afternoon. The military-issued commuter plane had landed on the leeward side of the island, and John Wilkes had met her at the ferry landing on the windward side. He shadowed her every step—even standing watch, like an impatient chaperone, while she choked down a slice of cardboard-flavored pizza for dinner. He nursed a warm beer in silence, glancing at the exit door every few minutes. She barely swallowed the last of her pizza before he practically frog-marched her out of the chow hall.
He drove her to the hotel and peeled out of the parking lot before she could even thank him. Obviously, whatever headway she had made with him earlier was lost.
Renée crossed to the open window. It was after seven o’clock, and the sun was mercifully setting behind the majestic Sierra Maestra. The mountain range once sheltered Taino Indians escaping colonial rule, and guerrilla fighters in the Spanish-American War—or what ten million Cubans across the fence line called the Cuban War of Independence. Even Fidel Castro once found sanctuary in the depths of the Sierra Maestra, but they were not proof against the heat.
She could feel the heaviness of the air on her skin. If it was this bad in a hotel room, what must it be like in a canvas tent in the middle of an abandoned airfield? She tried not to think about the people who hunkered down on the hot, broken asphalt less than a mile away.
There was nothing she could do for them. The Bush administration had decided Haitian refugees didn’t need lawyers. Instead, the US Coast Guard was deployed to intercept them at sea to dispense its Solomon-like wisdom. It was the US Coast Guard that decided, at least in the first instance, who would be saved and who would be sent back to Haiti like some rejected package stamped “Return to Sender.”
The process was as demoralizing as it was chaotic. Moments after being plucked from the sea, the traumatized and bedraggled refugees were lined up and treated to a barrage of questions.
“Who are you?”
“Where are you going?”
“Why did you leave your country?”
The lucky few who spoke English and could make a credible claim for asylum were “screened in.” They would be sent to the United States in a matter of days for further processing. Everyone else was “screened out.” They would soon find themselves on a one-way boat ride back to hell.
The US Coast Guard intercepted thirty-eight thousand Haitians and summarily returned twenty-eight thousand of them. No one got a lawyer, so why was Rose Fleurie so lucky?
Renée pulled away from the window and walked back to her desk, flipping open the file she had taken from Adam Hartmann. She sank down in the battered chair and skimmed through his memo, which mostly restated the small bits of information she already knew.
On Christmas Day, a US Coast Guard cutter stumbled on a gruesome scene: a lone female clinging to a wooden plank surrounded by eighteen corpses. The coast guard plucked Rose Fleurie out of the water and prepared to send her to Port-au-Prince, as they had so many others.
But Rose was not like the others.
Somewhere in Washington, DC, a phone rang in just the right office. Suddenly, Rose was being granted a temporary reprieve from deportation. More surprising still, she was granted the right to a lawyer.
Why? What made Rose so special?
It was true that she had worked in the Palais National, Haiti’s equivalent of the White House. But she was a civil servant and not technically a part of Aristide’s administration—despite the argument Renée made to Adam Hartmann earlier. Rose’s status should help her asylum case, but it didn’t explain why she was being treated so much better than the other refugees.
Renée paged through the file in search of answers. What she found was a photograph, a Polaroid of a young girl curled in the fetal position with an arm outstretched in a macabre plea for help. She must have been beautiful once, with her heart-shaped face, high cheekbones, and full lips, but she was not so beautiful now. Decomposition had already set in, eating away at her flesh while a patchwork of blue-green algae bloomed on her chest like a second skin.
Renée gently placed the picture on the desk, only to reveal the next one, and the next. She spread them out until eighteen pairs of sightless brown eyes stared helplessly back at her.
By now, she should be immune to pictures of drowned Haitians. They had become a staple on the front page of every newspaper in America. At the airport that morning, she’d picked up a copy of the Miami Daily Sun with a headline that screamed “Thirty-Three Dead in Florida’s Magnificent Mile.” The cover photo showed a grotesque mound of naked dead bodies framed against a backdrop of million-dollar homes.
The people of Hillsborough Beach were quick to complain. “The government has to do something about this,” one resident told a reporter. “We pay our taxes, and we object to living here with the remains of these boats and the stench they leave.”
Renée wrenched her gaze from the pictures, blinking back tears. The Hillsborough Beach Thirty-Three would remain nameless, but this little girl had an identity. She was Eléne Guillaume, five years old. She was born in Fond-des-Blancs, a town in the southern part of the island. Fond-des-Blancs was once an enclave for Polish immigrants who’d fought alongside the victorious slaves in Haiti’s revolutionary war.
It was all the information they had on this poor little girl. Name. Age. Place of birth. It was barely enough for an epitaph on a gravestone, but they were lucky to get even that much. Eléne had been carrying a passport wrapped in plastic and carefully stitched to the inside of her dress.
Renée scanned the autopsy report and landed on the all-important line: “Cause of death: Undetermined. Method of death: Homicide suspected.” While she might have assumed the cause of death for a floating body in the middle of the ocean was obvious, none of the eighteen corpses exhibited the telltale signs of drowning. There was no white froth on their mouths or noses, and no significant amount of water lodged in their lungs, stomachs, and intestines. As a result, the report ruled out drowning.
She marched over to the whining fan and shut it off. The temperature soared, and the abrupt silence hurt her ears, but she hardly noticed. She had bigger problems.
How the hell was she supposed to figure out what—or who—had killed eighteen people stranded on a small boat in the middle of the Caribbean Sea?
CHAPTER FIVE
Noye Map Noye
Tiny splatters of hot oil landed on my cheek, but I barely noticed as I seasoned a large bowl of griot. A splash here, a nick there, these small pains were as intimately familiar as the feel of my own skin. I have been cooking since I was five years old.
The first meal I ever made h
ad been for my mother, lambi in a spicy tomato sauce served with the fluffiest white rice. I got the conch from the neighbor boys. They gave me their catch that day—the day I was meant to die.
“Take it,” they’d urged, pushing a net full of wiggling snails at me, “but don’t tell your mother what happened. Oke?”
I grabbed the net with a huge smile. Silly boys, I would never have bothered my mother with such a thing.
I raced home and made straight for the outdoor kitchen. Cleaning the conch was easy. The boys had already pulled the snails from their shells; all I had to do was remove the dark, tough skin with a sharp knife and rinse the salt of the ocean away. Three bitter oranges, chicken bouillon cubes, vinegar, shallots, leeks, tomato paste, garlic, onions, and a habanero pepper went into the dish, just as my mother had taught me. I ground some special herbs in the mortar and added those too, something my mother never taught me.
Hours later, I served the meal on our best plates—the ones we’d used at my father’s funeral. I carried everything into our one-room shack, to the bed where my mother lay dying.
“Mouin pa grangou, choupite,” my mother whispered with a grimace. I am not hungry.
But I would not accept the gentle refusal. She hadn’t eaten in days, weeks even. The doctor had said cancer was destroying her insides, and she didn’t have the strength to fight. There was nothing we could do.
He was wrong. I knew that now.
“Ou dwe manje, Manman,” I insisted. You have to eat. I sat on the edge of the thin mat that served as her bed and gently feathered a few grains of rice and lambi onto a fork. I urged the food on her like a mother bird nursing her young.
My mother smiled at the explosion of flavor in her mouth. “Li bon,” she said, stunned that a five-year-old could create something so delicious—and that she was alive enough to enjoy it.
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