by Gregg Loomis
“And why us?” Lang wanted to know. “The Agency must have a dozen or so employees who’d love to spend a few winter days in the Caribbean.”
“Because you, both of you, can easily pass for Europeans on a holiday.” Lang started to protest but Miles dashed forward. “Look, you owe me a favor, remember? I’m the one who stuck out his neck to identify those people as Chinese intel. We, the Agency, can’t currently spare any Ops personnel who could pass for a German couple taking advantage of Haiti’s low hotel rates.”
“The rates are low,” Lang observed, “because few people want to go there. And you can’t spare any operatives because this is ninety-nine percent certain to come up empty.”
“I have never been to the Caribbean,” Gurt announced.
Lang was surprised. Not that Gurt had never been to the Caribbean but that she was showing interest in Miles’s suggestion. “If you want the Caribbean, believe me, Haiti is not the place to begin.”
Gurt gave him a quizzical look. “Is it not warm and sunny there this time of year? Do they not have beaches like I see in the magazines?”
Lang could see Miles was anticipating victory. “Yeah, but . . .”
“And is it not possible that the people in Venice who tried to kill us were Chinese?”
“Certainly possible,” Lang had to agree.
Miles clapped his hands. “Good! It’s settled then. I’ll make the arrangements. Now, where am I taking you to lunch?”
“Not so fast,” Lang cautioned. Turning to Gurt, he said, “We’ve just come back from several days in Venice. I don’t want to impose on our neighbors to keep Manfred again so soon . . .”
Gurt turned to Miles, saying conversationally, “Lang believes his son cannot live a few days without him. When he is away, he has to call the child at least twice a day. It as though Manfred is some sort of vegetable that will perish without his attention.” To Lang, she said, “Manfred will get along fine with Wynn Three, his best friend. Besides, we are keeping the neighbor’s little boy for two weeks this summer.”
News to Lang.
What wasn’t news was the fact they were going to Haiti. Gurt had made up her mind.
From the diary of Louis Etienne Saint Denis
December 20, 1802
The First Consul’s1 favorite sister is again troublesome! For some years the sexual conduct of Pauline, the second of the three sisters, has been the talk of all France. Though charming and beautiful, the woman is without discretion. In June of five years past, the First Consul was at Mombello Palace near Milan when he walked in on his sister in the process of having congress with one of his generals, Leclerc.2
Feigning fury, the First Consul demanded her honor be salvaged, and on June 14 of that year, they were married at the home of the then general, all as previously described in this diary. The couple do not match each other. Leclerc is serious, his face in a perpetual frown, while his bride is frivolous and quick to laugh. She continues her flirtatious ways, while he blushes at attention from other women.
In October of this year, realizing how tenuous is this union and aware of the scandal already growing concerning Pauline’s ill-concealed infidelities, the First Consul appointed Leclerc to put down the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue.3
She refused to go despite the pleas of her new husband, who in desperation appealed to her brother. Pauline also refused him. Under no illusions as to the scope of the scandals Pauline would create if left alone, Napoleon ordered a sedan chair to be brought to his sister’s home by ten of his largest grenadiers. The soldiers strapped her into the chair and marched her to a carriage in which she was sent to the port and bodily carried aboard ship, screaming and cursing.
The First Consul is well shed of her.
A strange thing happened as the ship slipped its moorings and let the tide take it from the quay. I was sitting in the carriage with the First Consul when General Leclerc appeared at the rail with what looked very much like the selfsame box the First Consul had held so dear when we departed Egypt. Leclerc held it aloft for the First Consul to see. The First Consul replied with a salute, and Leclerc turned and disappeared from view.
1 Joséphine thought her husband was to arrive at Le Havre and rushed there to meet him in hopes of squelching the news of her multiple adulteries. Napoleon was in Paris before she caught up to him.
2 Junot was the only general of Napoleon’s staff at this time who did not eventually achieve the rank of marshal of France. Could it be Napoleon blamed him for his wife’s indiscretions, a killing of the messenger?
3 She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie. “Joséphine” was the name Napoleon gave her.
4 Robespierre was overthrown and sentenced to the guillotine himself. A much-admired orator, he was on the scaffold addressing the mob when someone shot him in the jaw. He went to his death mute. Thus ended the Terror.
5 Martinique.
6 Small by the standards of Versailles, perhaps. Even today the formal garden surrounding Malmaison is impressive.
7 In June or July of 320 BC, Perdiccas arrived on the banks of the Nile to do battle with Ptolemy to retrieve Alexander’s mummified body. He was defeated by a combination of better intelligence by Ptolemy, having to cross a river with tricky currents and the voracious appetite of the Nile crocodiles, who fed on the living and dead for days afterward.
8 In spite of the mania for “logic” and “science” in postrevolutionary France, Napoleon had his personal astrologer, whom he consulted on matters both military and civil.
1 In November of 1799, Napoleon, aided by troops of General Leclerc, staged a coup, overthrowing the revolutionary government and bestowing this title upon himself.
2 Charles Victor Emmanuel Leclerc was only twenty-nine at the time of the nuptials. Pauline, or Paulette as she was known to her family, was twenty-one. He was not her first choice of husbands.
3 Haiti. At this time, the name included what is today the Dominican Republic. There is some evidence Leclerc’s mission was somewhat more ambitious and included a stepping-stone conquest of what are today Puerto Rico, Cuba and then the newly independent United States by way of French Louisiana. This theory might be indirectly supported by the fact Napoleon sold Louisiana within months of France’s withdrawal from Haiti, thereby ceding her last interest in the Western Hemisphere, other than an enclave in South America and a few insignificant islands.
CHAPTER THREE
Westview Cemetery, Atlanta
The next morning
Lang turned off I-20 onto Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, made a left and drove through the arch that marked the entrance to Atlanta’s largest cemetery. Passing the newer grave sites marked only by bronze plaques, he entered the older section, rolling hills dotted with an eclectic selection of gravestones, statues and funerary monuments. He parked the Porsche behind a vintage Cadillac. It and the Porsche were the only cars in sight. He climbed a slight rise, walking toward a giant oak tree whose winter-bare limbs seemed to be supplicating the heavens.
A few yards to his left, an elderly woman in black leaned on the arm of young Latino in chauffeur’s uniform as she hobbled up the hill, using her free hand to clutch a flat of pansies. He had seen her here on more than one occasion.
Just short of the tree, Lang stopped in front of three headstones. Dawn, his first wife, Janet, his sister, and Jeff, her adopted son. Lang came here to visit just before every trip he took out of the country. It was as if he were saying a possible farewell to the only kin he had before Gurt had re-entered his life with Manfred. For reasons he could not have explained, he never mentioned these trips to the cemetery. Although he was sure Gurt would understand, he felt some vague sense of disloyalty to his present family that had kept him silent on the subject of visiting his previous one.
Facing the three graves, he sat on the base of a statue of an angel, its arms reaching out as though imploring observers to follow through a closed door behind it, an early and exuberant display of early-twentieth-cen
tury family wealth by people he had never heard of.
Not far away, the old woman was directing the planting of the pansies around the marble figure of another angel, this one weeping.
If Lang could have spoken to his wife, his sister and much-loved adopted nephew, what would he tell them? Dawn, he knew, would be proud of his success in the legal world, thrilled he had the son she could not give him. Conversely, she would be less than happy about the violence that had stalked his life. Like the affair in Venice.
“Dammit,” he said aloud. “I don’t go looking for trouble.”
Not quite true, he reproved himself. He and Gurt weren’t leaving for Haiti entirely for a vacation.
“I can’t just sit by,” he explained to the breeze that was gently ruffling his hair. “I can’t just hope those people will go away.”
The woman in black interrupted the instructions to her chauffeur to glance sternly in his direction. Lang had not realized his voice had carried. He gave her an embarrassed smile.
Turning slightly, he faced Janet’s headstone. A pediatric orthopedist, she had spent four or five months of the year donating her services to the children of undeveloped countries. In Central America she had encountered the small boy on the dirt streets of a nameless village, homeless and parentless. She had fought a two-year paper war to adopt him.
Lang took a deep breath. She would be proud of the foundation he had created to provide children’s medical care across the globe. But perhaps not so proud about how he had funded it with an accord with the very organization responsible for her and Jeff’s deaths.
Lang stood, weary of the accusations of the dead, perhaps a little angry. It always ended this way.
“I did the best I could,” he said, not caring whether the old woman heard him or not.
Lang walked back down the hill, stopping for a final look at the three headstones before driving away. For reasons as inexplicable as his failure to tell Gurt of these visits, he felt he had completed a duty.
Cap Haitien
Two days later
Miles and Lang had decided that arrival in Haiti would be less likely observed if made at the north-coast port of entry. With the country’s communications system still somewhere in the mid-twentieth century, there was an excellent chance they would be gone by the time the paperwork associated with their landing found its way into any central system.
Scheduled service to Cap Haitien by commercial carriers having been long abandoned, Gurt and Lang had taken Delta to Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands and chartered a flight from there. Lang was in the right front seat of the lumbering antique Beech B18, nervously watching the number-two engine spew oil onto a wing whose white paint had been bleached into chalk by the Caribbean sun. There were more empty holes in the instrument panel than instruments.
Lang had mentioned this when he and Gurt first boarded the venerable old machine nearly an hour ago.
“No worry, mon,” the native pilot had assured them. “Ain’ no radio, no instrument landin’ equipment at Cap Haitien nohow.”
Lang looked apprehensively at the panel. “I don’t see any GPS. How do you find it, the airport?”
The pilot shrugged. “You goes to the first ocean and turns right. Afta ’bout an hour, you looks for de tallest clouds. Haiti be unner ’em. Ain’ but one airstrip on de no’th coast.”
Unmollified but out of objections, Lang had uneasily strapped himself in. Before GPS, before navigational instrumentation, this was how flying was done, right? Lindbergh had made it all the way from New York to Paris with only a compass, right? Jimmy Doolittle had found Tokyo with not much more, right?
None of the above eased his concern in the least.
A flash of green caught his eye and in the next moment the aircraft banked left to parallel golden sands. On the right side of the plane jagged mountains seemed to grow from the beach’s edge and claw at the clouds like the talons of a raptor.
There was a grinding sound and the Beechcraft shuttered. Lang desperately hoped he was experiencing only the lowering of the landing gear into the airstream. As if to reassure him, the plane banked again. When it rolled out, an airstrip filled the windscreen, increasing in size as the plane descended. The paving seemed out of place among what looked like postage-stamp-sized fields of sugarcane. At the runway threshold, and what Lang guessed was no more than a hundred feet, the pilot leveled off, flying the length of the strip without farther descent. At the end, on the edge of the ocean, he added power and began a 180-degree turn back toward the other end.
“What . . . ?”
“Livestock, mon,” the pilot replied nonchalantly. “Natives’ pigs sometimes gets loose and onto de runway. De airplane go over low, scare ’em off. You got any idea what a mess o’ dis plane hittin’ a pig make?”
It was something Lang had rather not consider.
The next approach was uneventful.
The instant the Beechcraft slowed to taxi speed, Lang felt as though he had been covered with a warm, wet blanket. The old aircraft had no air-conditioning and the hot, humid air filled the cabin not only with a cloying, prickly grasp but with a faint odor of sewage and wood smoke.
As the plane taxied back up the runway, two figures emerged from a small concrete-block building on the edge of the tarmac. One wore a guayabera, the short-sleeve, four-pocket shirt worn over the top of trousers, common in the Caribbean. The other was tall for a Haitian, perhaps six feet, and wore a long-sleeve olive drab uniform. Both were black. Not the browns and tans of most islands’ natives but the soot black of undiluted African lineage.
“Customs and immigration,” explained the pilot, hastily shutting down the left engine, then the right.
The temperature and humidity seemed to leap upward as Lang and Gurt exited the plane, followed by the pilot.
On closer inspection, Lang noted the tall Haitian’s uniform was wool, yet he seemed unperturbed by the searing heat and drenching humidity. In his belt was stuck a Webley revolver, the standard British military sidearm for the better part of the twentieth century. This one looked as though it might have seen service in Flanders Fields or in the 1916 Somme offensive. Lang would have guessed, if fired, the weapon would present as much peril to the shooter as the target.
The man in the guayabera accepted a sheaf of papers from the pilot. First-, second- or third-world country, one thing never changed: the paper required by bureaucracy.
“Passports?”
Lang and Gurt each handed over the German passports they had used to exit the United States. The man compared them with the papers the pilot had given him, studying so long Lang was getting edgy even though he assured himself these had been prepared by the Agency’s very talented forgers.
The customs official’s brow wrinkled.
“Is there something wrong?” Gurt asked.
The man brightened, showing white teeth that seemed to glitter against the black velvet of his face. “You speak English!” He held up one of the passports. “I have never seen a Dutch one before.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“German,” she corrected.
“But it says, ‘Dutch.’”
Gurt stood beside him, her finger pointing to the word, “Deutsch. It is the German word for ‘German.’ ”
His smile widened as he produced a stamp from his pocket and imprinted both passports. “Dutch, German. Welcome to Haiti. Do you have a hotel reservation?”
Gurt reached into her purse, producing a slip of paper. “No, but we were told the Mont Joli is quite nice.”
“No matter. I do not think either hotel in Cap Haitien is full at the moment. I—”
He was interrupted by the sound of an unmuffled engine. What had at one time been a sixties-vintage Ford sedan, now painted a vibrant blue, rumbled up to the building. Its bodywork looked as though it had been modified with a baseball bat, and the tires showed more cord than rubber.
“Ah!” the customs man exclaimed. “Someone saw the plane come in
. This is André, my cousin, who has a taxi ser vice.”
He turned to speak to the new arrival in a language Lang could not even begin to understand. Leaving the engine running, André dashed for the plane as though afraid it might suddenly take off on its own. He stood by while the pilot opened the nose baggage compartment and handed him two bags.
“Is that all your luggage?” the customs man wanted to know.
Lang and Gurt assured him it was.
Another burst of what Lang gathered was Creole and the cab driver lugged the two suitcases to the rear of his car, set them down and began to unwind the wire holding the trunk shut.
“Do those luggages have any tobacco, liquor or firearms in them?”
Lang and Gurt shook their heads. “No.”
The customs man nodded approval. “Good. That will be fifty dollars American, landing, arrival and customs fees.”
Lang and Gurt exchanged glances.
“That’s over a month’s pay here,” Lang said softly, reaching into a pocket. “You have any dollars on you?”
“I changed some euros in Providenciales,” she answered, digging in her purse, “when I bought a pair of sunglasses.”
“But you didn’t need another pair.”
“No, but we needed someone to remember we had euros in case someone should ask,” she whispered. “We are Germans, remember?”
No doubt Gurt was more current in tradecraft, Lang thought. He had completely forgotten creating a legend, the practice of leaving a series of believable clues supporting whatever identity one was using. More often than not, no one would be checking. But if they did, they would only confirm what they had been led to believe.
“Here.” Gurt was proffering five ten-dollar bills.
“Fifty, all right. How big a bill did you change?”
“A hundred. I wanted to make sure we were remembered as having euros, not dollars.”
“Lucky for us the Turks and Caicos’s currency is the dollar.”
As the cab drove away, Lang turned to look through a very dirty rear window. The man in the guayabera and the man in the uniform were dividing the money.