The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6

by B. Hesse Pflingger

  I went downstairs, looked for Brown’s assistant. He lay unconscious behind the desk, knocked out. The register book had been flung to the ground. The car keys were in the ignition. It was a rental. I drove his car down the road and around the corner, wiped the door handle, keys and steering wheel with my hankie, and left it there for somebody to steal.

  Brown returned from the AmEx office, travelers cheques in hand. I told him about my little to-do. “No idea who?”

  “No ID. Nothing in the car. I left him tied up and gagged in my room. Any point in questioning him?”

  “Only if it makes a difference to you. A rented car means he’s not Haiti government, meaning he’s no concern of theirs. We’ll have to get him out of here, but let’s see what Joseph comes back with before we decide what to do.”

  Joseph returned with good news. For a modest consideration, the contractor would take me up with materials he was delivering to La Source that evening, night deliveries occasioning less traffic and fewer roadblock shakedowns. Hotel Trianon was on his way. He’d stop by after dusk. Brown came back with cheques in $50s. He said $100 would take care of everything; I insisted on $150. He signed the others over to me. One problem solved. For the time being. We took a table in the bar for a late afternoon happy hour, me prepared to scurry up the stairs at first sign of intruders. The cook fixed me an early dinner. The contractor’s truck pulled in as I finished it. He, Brown and I went up to my room.

  My visitor had come to. Squatting behind him (no sense enabling him to ID me), I unwrapped his head. He was not a happy camper. We tried, in every language we could muster, to find out whom he represented. He just glared at us. After he had spat at Brown, I stuffed the towel back in his mouth and re-wrapped him. “We can dump him someplace,” the contractor suggested. Excellent idea. We lugged him downstairs, stuffed him in the back of the truck with the cinder blocks and sacks of cement and covered him with a tarp.

  “What about a little disguise?” Brown suggested. He went into a room off the lobby and came back with glasses, a fake mustache, a safari-type shirt and a topee pith helmet. “Things people have left behind. It may help in the dark,” he said. What the heck? I put them on. “Oh, and pack that thug’s revolver along. You’ll find out why in La Source.”

  It was about 40 miles up Route Nationale 40, one of the longest 40 miles I’d ever traveled. The road was narrow and potholed, traffic was slow, and once we cleared the city, the grades into the mountains were steep. The two roadblocks we ran into just shook us down for a few gourdes and didn’t slow us up much. I couldn’t make out much of the countryside in the dark. Flimsy huts along the verge, skinny people trudging along (“Zombies,” the contractor said, then laughed), trash of all kinds everywhere. If ever a place could have benefited from “Adopt-a-Highway”… At a wide spot on the shoulder in a little valley where the contractor could see the road for a distance in both directions, he pulled to a stop and waited until the coast was clear. Then we jumped out, pulled the tarp off our thug, dragged him out of the truck and laid him beside the road.

  “Somebody will find him and turn him loose,” the contractor assured me. “The Tontons dump people out here all the time. Usually not this much alive, though.”

  We reached La Scale around 10 p.m.—three hours to cover 40 miles. The contractor brought the truck up to a small white church. “Mr. Brown contacted the priest (NOTE: no names, don’t want trouble finding my friends). He’ll put you up for the night and get you across the border in the morning.” I asked him if U.S. $50 was enough for the ride. More than enough, he said, but it was the smallest I had. I signed a cheque back to Brown, explaining that Brown could cash it and pay him, leaving no paper linking him with me.

  The priest was still up and expecting me. He welcomed me into his residence, a modest and, considering the context, well-kept bungalow. It was a Catholic mission, but the church itself was like none I’d ever seen. The Christ and the saints were all black, amid exotic, electric-hued pictures, relics and symbols, more African than Western. “Most Haitians consider themselves Catholic,” he explained. “But also, most Haitians believe in voodoo. So over the years we’ve created a fusion, keeping the essence and the rites of Catholicism but yielding to local customs. I think we do the people some good. I hope so,” he concluded. He showed me to an alcove with a narrow, simple bed in it. “Sleep well. We’ll get you across the border in the morning.”

  I was up early, as was the priest. He took me into his bare-bones kitchen cum dining room, sat me on a pine bench at a small wood table and gave me a cup of hair-raising strength coffee. “You’ll have to excuse our cuisine this morning,” he said. “We share the diet of the people.” He cooked his own food in battered pots on a wood stove. He dished up plates of rice and beans, added chunks of bread, and sat down with me. I’ve never balked at modest peasant food, but the bread qualified as barely edible. In response to my ill-concealed revulsion he said, “There’s no wheat flour outside of Port au Prince and little enough there. We use manioc for flour. It’s terrible, but it’s what we have. Agriculture in Haiti is the poorest of the poor. Topsoil has eroded away, so even though every inch of arable land is cultivated, and the farmers work very hard, crops are sparse. In a few hours, things will be better for you. Alas, they will never be better for the Haitians.”

  We’d finished eating and were having a second cup of coffee when we heard a car drive up, and then a rap on the door. The priest said something, and a young black woman in a bright, full cotton dress came in. “She’ll take you to the border crossing. She does speak a little English.” I assembled my gear and came out, sans mustache and glasses, ready to go.

  “Can I pay you something for your trouble?” I asked the priest. “A donation for the poor or whatever?”

  “Not money, no. But Mr. Brown said you had some guns with you. Perhaps you could share with us? There are rebels here in the mountains, well-meaning men, good men. I don’t know that they have much chance of overthrowing Mr. Duvalier and his Tontons, but what can one do? Certainly guns would aid their cause.”

  I dug into my backpack. There was the Glock I salvaged out of the chopper. There was the revolver I took from the hood yesterday. And the automatic I collected in Jamaica. “I only need one,” I said. “Here’s two for your boys.” I kept the automatic with its silencer and the extra clips.

  “I will pass them along, with much gratitude. Are you ready to leave?” he asked the girl. She motioned me to come.

  She drove us in a faded VW Bug, battered but running decently. “The border is just a few miles,” she said, “but you need papers to get across, which I understand you do not have. The Dominican Republic is not welcoming of Haitians, nor of undocumented foreigners. So I will take you most of the way, and then you must go across country to Jimani, avoiding border control. Feel like a little hike this fine morning?”

  Up in the mountains it wasn’t as hot as in town, at least. “Sure, let’s do it.”

  The village comprised whitewashed mud houses, with straw or rusted sheet iron roofs, interspersed with banana palms, stunted trees, dusty shrubs and trash. On the way out, I noticed a large group of raucous boys, each with a big plastic tub. They were standing in a line of sorts, rough housing and cavorting as boys do the world over. But nobody bothered the boys walking away with their plastic tubs on their heads. “What’s happening there?” I asked.

  “They gather at the standpipe each morning. It’s the town’s only decent source of water. So they fill their tubs and take them back home balanced on their heads. They’re little boys in line, but grown-ups after they fill their tubs.”

  La Source sat near a huge lake. It reminded me of Mono Lake in the California Sierras—a big body of blue water surrounded by desolate hills and mountains. Except that Mono Lake wasn’t surrounded by trash and garbage and a multitude of destitute black people. We drove beside the lake for a couple of miles. As we approached a roadside shack
with clearly painted, official-looking signs in French and English, a soldier stepped out and waved us to a halt. Uh oh. I unzipped my pack and was reaching for my pistol. She cautioned me off. The soldier came to her window. She rolled it down, and he said something. She answered. Then she opened the door. “Don’t worry,” she whispered to me. “This won’t take a minute.” The soldier escorted her into the shack. I scrunched down in my seat, pulled my topee hat down over my face and did my best to avoid curious eyes.

  She returned to the car and resumed the driver’s seat. “It’s a little game we play,” she explained. “He tells me I’ve got contraband hidden in my petticoats. I tell him that if he does a personal inspection he will find that isn’t true. So we take a little time together in his guard shack. I think he wants to marry me. We’ll see.”

  The road continued along the lake, then took a swing southerly. She ran the car down a dirt track to the right for a half mile. “The border is another half mile ahead. You will want to go off the trail and walk south through the brush down this valley, maybe a mile just to be sure. Then turn directly east and walk maybe five miles until you come to a river. You may find trails. It’s a popular route. Follow the river, and it will take you directly into Jimani.”

  I thanked her for the ride, gave her the rest of my gourdes and set off across the bleak landscape. In twenty minutes, I turned toward where the sun had risen and left Haiti behind me, hopefully forever. Gun-running? Ha! Clyde Driffter had nothing on me.

  5 | 007 Shanty Town

  The early morning hour, the high mountain elevation and October weather made the dusty hike not only endurable but after pressure-cooker Port au Prince, positively exhilarating. I strode along in good spirits, my pack light on my back, reveling in the cool, dry air. Judging from the trash and litter along the way, it obviously was a popular route for Haitians without papers, or whose business in the Dominican Republic wouldn’t pass muster with the guards manning the gate. Crossing that border compared to the point in The Wizard of Oz at which Dorothy wakes up after the cyclone—from black-and-white Kansas farmland to Technicolor Oz. It didn’t happen that abruptly, but I soon found the forested, green, well-tended land I entered quite an improvement over Haiti’s dusty, grimy, squalid landscape.

  Beyond that border, lighter skinned folks became more abundant, Latinos rather than Blacks or Mulattos. I discarded my topee pith helmet, the fake mustache and the glasses that Mr. Brown gave me. No need for a phony disguise, this crowd I could blend into. I followed the river road into Jimani, a border town of a few thousand. Its population looked better fed and cared for than the village I’d just left. Not that Jimani folks enjoyed country club lifestyles, but at least naked kids with starvation-bulged bellies weren’t trailing along behind me with tiny hands out and desperate eyes. Jimani didn’t compare with Tijuana for border town action, primarily because the other side of the border wasn’t bursting with Gringo money to spend on trinkets, booze, drugs and whores. Rather, an outpost far from population centers, it served as a barrier forestalling a Haitian influx from pressing further into the Dominican Republic.

  I bought some chow from a food vendor in the town marketplace, a plate of spicy pork, rice and black beans, with a couple corn tortillas, and washed it down with a warm beer. A welcome upgrade over Haiti street food. My Southern California Spanish sufficed to get directions from the vendor to the town bus stop. The ticket clerk sold me a seat on one leaving for Santo Domingo within the hour.

  The crow route from Jimani to Santo Domingo covers about 150 miles, but on the ground my trip stretched a lot further. The route followed a network of well-paved rural highways, numbers 46, 44 and 2, mostly through forested hills and farmland. Route 46 skirted along the edge of Sierra Baoruco National Park, as inviting a garden spot of tropical paradise as I’d seen. The island, Hispaniola, lies about 20 degrees north latitude, giving the lush mountains and valleys a balmy climate, not the steam bath of equatorial jungle. The plantations and small-hold farms on the coastal flats didn’t rise above third-world, of course, but by that standard seemed prosperous. The roads weren’t trash-littered, and the people I saw from the bus wore non-patched, non-tattered clothing. Yes, I could appreciate why they’d strive to keep Haitian hordes from spilling over the border.

  The bus made stops to let off and take on passengers, including restroom breaks and an afternoon half hour for eats and a leg-stretch in the town of Bani. We rolled into Santo Domingo central bus terminal around dinnertime. I got an assortment of empanadas at a nearby food stall—chicken, shrimp, pork, smothered in spicy sauces—and a cold beer to wash them down with. Outside the tourist orbit, Spanish was the lingua franca, which I knew enough of at least to get around. I pulled out the name and address Evanston had telexed to Hotel Trianon, and showed it to a cab driver. He studied it, then motioned me in. I had no idea of the Santo Domingo city layout, but the route we followed put me on guard. The guy supposedly was one of Evanston’s many overseas contacts, and Evanston had a lot of money. Assuming that his cronies must be in the same lines of business, I’d envisaged a palm-shaded bungalow by the sea. Instead, the driver took us through the modern city center, past some well-preserved and maintained traditional districts, and into a hillside slum. I don’t mean to imply it was in the same league as the plywood/tarpaper/rusty-roofed horrors of Port au Prince, but it didn’t seem the kind of place anybody affluent would live voluntarily. The neighborhood comprised housing blocks of cement and plastered cinderblocks, some painted, some their natural grey, cascading down low hills and spilling out on the flat below. They weren’t decrepit and falling-down, but definitely a little more decor, or at least a fresh coat of whitewash would brighten the place. The cab wound up through twisted, narrow streets and stopped in front of a larger place, the one highest up on the hillside. A rusted American sedan sat parked in a little bay let into the road. A chubby cat disappeared under it as I got out. I checked the address I’d been given. Yep, unless we were in the wrong neighborhood entirely, this was the place.

  I climbed a steep stairway to a bare cement porch jutting from an unadorned concrete façade. Lights showed through barred front windows. The dark hardwood front door had native designs carved into it. I tapped the knocker—it made a heavier sound than I’d expected. I heard voices inside, then determined footsteps. A concealed sliding panel opened, and hostile eyes peered out. “What do you want?”

  “I’m looking for Bond at this address.” (I’m codenaming Evanston’s contact “Bond;” he deserves his anonymity.)

  “Who are you?”

  “Jake Fonko. I got your name from Evanston Wheeler. He said I should contact you here.”

  “Ev Wheeler? Well, shit goddamn. Just a minute.” He snapped the peephole shut. Some locks clicked, and the door swung open. “Come on in, what’d you say your name was?”

  The cabbie had been waiting below to make sure we’d got the right place. I’d paid him, and now I waved him away. “Jake Fonko,” I replied. I stepped past him into the foyer. The door made a deep thud when he closed it, the locks loud clinks. The carved hardwood, it turned out, fronted heavy metal. The place was larger than it looked from outside, and if not luxurious, it was definitely comfortable. The front windows commanded a sweeping view of Santo Domingo.

  “Jake Fonko… seems to me I’ve heard of you… you did some things with the CIA, is that it?” Bond deviated from the Sean Connery movie character in every way possible. About Evanston’s age—60ish—he wore a loose fitting flowered tropical-weight cotton shirt that draped over a beer-gut. His droopy shorts hung below his knees, leaving hairy legs descending through puffy ankles to scuffed deck shoes. His face was more florid than tanned, punctuated by a pencil-mustache. A cross-pate sweep of slicked down grey hair made a vain attempt to camouflage a receded hairline.

  “Nothing that I can talk about,” I said.

  “CIA guys do a lot of things like that. So, what does old Ev have to say?”
>
  “Not much. I needed a friendly in Santo Domingo on short notice, and he came up with your name. Where do you know him from?”

  “The OSS. We both worked there in World War Two. I was in field ops, and Ev was one of my liaisons. Wild times. You needed a friendly? What’s up? Hey, let’s go in the living room, get comfortable. Can I get you anything?”

  “Right now, could you point me to a bathroom? I’ve suddenly developed an overwhelming urge to take a dump.”

  He ushered me to a powder room in the hallway, and I just made it to the crapper. Shit! Literally.

  “Happens to everybody down here, especially from street food,” Bond reassured me when I rejoined him. “I’ll get you some cement pills. Plug you right up. Unless it’s something serious you picked up in Haiti, you’ll be good as new in the morning.” He pointed to a leather easy chair. “Have a seat.” He disappeared into the hallway. I saw in the kitchen a young Latina woman, humming to herself as she busied herself with something. Bond returned shortly with a small bottle in his hand and passed it to me. “Lupe,” he shouted out to the kitchen, “could you bring our guest a glass with some ice in it? And some more ice for me?” Back to me, he said, “How about a little rum to wash those pills down with?”