The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  They had brought the suspect in late this morning, and his future looked bleak, damned. They had gotten an admission of guilt from him, freely given, and little else.

  Five dead in all. The first two in Georgia on Thursday, three more on Friday: one in Pensacola, Florida, and two in Mississippi. By Friday, Caribe had completely vanished from the grocery shelves of the Southland. The FBI and FDA were scrutinizing for an emergent pattern, although the locations of the poisoned coffee drinkers, and the stores where the tainted packages had been purchased, suggested no localized pattern whatsoever. A long weekend’s worth of FDA inspection of recalled product had thus far turned up another two tainted boxes, neither of which appeared tampered with at the consumer level. The boxes were intact, and even the individually wrapped coffee bags appeared inviolate. Yet solid nuggets from ground cyanide pellets had been found inside the bags. Which would seem to indicate that the poisoner was either as skilled as a magician…

  Or the contamination had come from inside Carrefour Imports’ Caribe production house itself.

  Of notable interest was the apparent foresight someone had had in keeping the random victims from sensing anything amiss with their morning cups. Cyanide was not odorless; it had a characteristic smell of burnt almonds. And, without exception, every tainted package was Caribe’s Almond Flavor variety.

  Here was news to crush the heart, infect the soul, and why had Dorcilus Fonterelle done this to him?

  By last night, inspectors from the FDA were crawling all over the Carrefour premises. Nosing through each and every stage of the production line, from the sorting bins of the coffee beans themselves, to the roasters, the grinders, to the hoppers where the processed coffee was measured into the individual flow-through bags, each bag to be sealed in foil.

  As well — FDA memory still fresh regarding the Chilean grape scare, perhaps — a federal freeze had been slapped onto all his imports. Tons of fruit on pallets, from the Caribbean and South America, just sitting in his warehouses. Getting ripe. Going rotten. Christophe could not even bear to look at it. Like watching his own money going up in smoke.

  But misfortune, even when catastrophic, he could handle. A Haitian was nothing if not fatalistic. A tiny island nation of six million stoics, most born to poverty they could never dream of escaping. A few might make it, and a few of those prosper ... but none could scour away the hopeless taint of the land itself, not completely. He would survive, always survive.

  But it did not keep him from burning to know why this man he had hired years before — a countryman, no less, and until recently an exemplary worker — had done this deed.

  Virgil Bean had, on the way here to the station, apprised him of everything he’d managed to learn from phone conversations with the police and the district attorney’s office. While it all fit, nothing made sense.

  Dorcilus Fonterelle had been arrested this morning on Canal Street, a broad thoroughfare dividing uptown from downtown, and filled with liquor stores, cut-rate camera shops, and where high- and low-rent merchants rubbed abrasive shoulders. Dorcilus had gone to a pawn shop and attempted to hock an emerald necklace worth thousands. An ill-dressed, shambling black man, no recent bath … the white proprietor had been immediately suspicious. Especially since a two-month-old burglary a few blocks away had gone unsolved. The police had come around from the Vieux Carré station and taken Fonterelle without incident while he was still in the shop.

  The necklace turned out to have been stolen during the August 13 burglary of LJ Jewelers. When shown a photograph, the senior Jablonski identified Fonterelle as having been ejected several times from the premises around the time of the burglary. They had thought him a vagrant. A quick search of Fonterelle’s apartment turned up most of the remaining goods taken, kept loose in a pillowcase on a closet shelf.

  But two and two had been drifting together even before the search of the apartment was underway. A background check on their unlikely jewel thief spat out his place of employment: Carrefour Imports, hip-deep in its own steaming quagmire. A detective in Robbery was quick to seize upon coincidence and point out that not only had jewelry been taken in the August 13 burglary, but a small quantity of cyanide pellets, as well.

  In solid form, Bean had explained — and this was news to them both — cyanide was sometimes used by jewelers as a cleaning agent.

  All of a sudden, it looked as if the latest product-tampering scare to hit the country had been an inside job. The coffee bags had been lethal before they had even left the factory.

  Christophe Granvier had to know why, had to come face-to-face with the man who’d killed five innocents and brought him to ruin. And without rancor, without rage, without tears, look him in the eyes and ask him why.

  NOPD headquarters was a bustle of officers and their petty collars. Drunken celebrants whose revels had gotten out of hand; prostitutes and pickpockets, muggers and other small-timers. A suited contrast to the rest, Bean and Christophe fought for the attention of the desk sergeant. Let the lawyer do the talking — they’d gotten clearance today for Christophe Granvier to visit his former employee for a few minutes. No, no, I’m not representing him, do I look like a public defender to you?

  Two doors and a hallway later, they were met by a uniformed officer who escorted them to a small windowless room. Christophe entered, told Bean he would prefer the lawyer wait in the hall. This was no matter of law, nor business. This was honor and truth at stake. Fine, fine, Bean told him. Those little rooms always made him claustrophobic anyway. They were made for sweating.

  Christophe Granvier entered, door latching behind him. He sat at one of three wooden chairs around a small table. This room held no cheer. Brown coffee stains on the walls, even splotched onto ceiling tiles. One had but to close his eyes and feel the anguish, radiant from the walls. The blood shed here, the cold sweat of confessions under duress from conscience or force. All the hate expended in this room, toward selves, toward others, impulses both murderous and suicidal. He could feel it all.

  He found something solemn in this whole business, of looking into the eyes of his financial executioner, telling the man he was forgiven. That he was but an instrument of fate, and fate had no choice but to fall upon the head destined to receive it. Christophe had already bowed his head, received the blow. He had lived, and this was enough. He could ask for no more mercy than that.

  The door opened, and then they were three.

  “I’ll be staying in here with you, Mr. Granvier,” said the cop who brought him. Young and uniformed, with a trim mustache. “That’s the way it’s got to be. You understand.”

  The officer sat Fonterelle into a chair, declining one for himself. Folding arms over his chest and leaning into one corner like a statue. Christophe scarcely noticed. Could scarcely take his eyes off Dorcilus Fonterelle.

  This man was nothing as he had remembered, and it was not memory that was at fault.

  Dorcilus Fonterelle sat in his chair as if his bones were bowed. He was but in his late twenties, and now looked older than that by two decades. The furrowed brow, the slack cheeks, cracked lips trembling in periodic spasms. Christophe had not known him well, had had little occasion to see him in anything more than infrequent passing, but he remembered Dorcilus as a man of robust good humor and energy.

  And his eyes…

  They were the eyes of one who saw nightmares in his waking world as well as his dreams. He stared down at the tabletop, shaking his head to himself. He might not have even known Christophe was in the same room. At this point there was no way to be certain.

  “Dorcilus,” said Christophe. No response. “Dorcilus.”

  He looked up, turtle-slow, with a crawl of recognition. His eyes squeezed shut, face smearing into a countenance of misery. Tears began to trickle.

  “Do you know me?” Christophe said. “Who I am?”

  Dorcilus swallowed with great effort, lowered his head in a pellucid nod.

  “Then tell me. Who is this before you?”

 
; Christophe heard his name whispered, rasping in soft broken syllables.

  “What they say, is it true? That you are the one who poisoned the coffee? Is this true?”

  Dorcilus’s head rolled atop his neck, canting to one side while tears dripped to his shoulder. A miserable nod, then, “Yes.” A moth might have made more noise.

  “Then why? Tell me why.”

  Dorcilus sat like a man in physical torment, crucified to his chair. His shoulders sagged under a broken spirit. They trembled, and with bony hands he reached around to hug himself. Eyes remote in their world of endless suffering, he sobbed. Took a jagged breath, then wailed with the pain of martyrs.

  He was truly frightening to behold. Wasting away from within, clothes hanging from his body like wash hung out to dry. A man who no longer had a will of his own, something having crushed him from the inside out as if he were no more than a roach. Grief, remorse, regret … of these Christophe had seen plenty. And while all were present in Dorcilus Fonterelle, there was much more wearing him down than those. He had seen this before.

  The twentieth-century man, the rationalist … these layers of Christophe’s life had served him well in his adopted country. He had prospered. But they had served to veil him from the past, things whispered in his homeland in the dark of night or the cloak of shadows. He had been away from Haiti for too long. Long enough to forget.

  Very well, then. He’d looked into the face of the man who had been the instrument of his destruction. Found one truth, and if the root of the rest had escaped him in this visit, perhaps it was better off not known. Someone had sent this man, this creature, against him. That was more than enough knowledge.

  He need spend no more time in its company.

  Christophe rose, left Dorcilus quietly sobbing in his chair. “Thank you.” He nodded to the cop, who nodded back and moved to collect the accused and take him back to his cell.

  Virgil Bean fell in step beside him on his way out the door, into the hall. Leaning in with his long, pinched features.

  “I just heard that they got a court-appointed psychiatrist coming to evaluate him. They don’t expect him to be declared mentally competent.”

  “He’s not,” Christophe said. “He never will be.”

  To believe this was anathema, that such inhumanity and terror tactics might spread beyond Haiti. Might follow him here, a legacy from an older world carried to this new shore by an enemy whose name he might never know. Such things were best left behind with poverty and ignorance, where the mere mention of their existence brought shudders from the superstitious, the less enlightened. Such things belonged in a land where dread fell over the countryside along with the night, where every animal cry might be a wandering spirit, and every shadow mask ill intent.

  What he had left behind in that room, they had a name for it back home.

  The zombi.

  Late night in his jail cell, around the corner in Central Lockup on South White, with dim lights shining from the ceiling like so many cold suns. Dorcilus had drawn himself into a fetal ball on his bunk, to shake the night away. He never really slept anymore, just lay awake dreaming of the grave. Only there would he belong, to listen to the sliding of worms through a cool earth.

  Memories of life, seen through the haze of death, burial, resurrection: They were fragments, torn pictures that fell from jittery fingers. He had once been a man who had loved life … loved his work, his fun, his few friends. Loved even the memory of his homeland, for his years away had dulled the memories of life under the rule of the Duvaliers, and he could remember the verdant island nation, like a living jewel in a sea of crystal blue. The spice of its food, the heat of its passions.

  A land where dead men could walk again.

  Death had come in a watery bayou, i lie in coffin cold he takes my clothes cuts hair cuts nails djab blanc he takes my soul to keep for his own HE OWNS ME whispers in my ear in coffin i can’t move lid on top of me o the dark and the hammers THE HAMMERS pound the nails thunder in my ears they put me in the ground the hole the grave and they smell me the worms—

  Life since then had been repetition, only what was allowed. To work like an automaton, to go home and wait until he was to work again. Time meant nothing, days became weeks became months, and to the dead they were all the same. Pellets given to him one morning, to be carried in a tiny vial in his pocket like kernels of feed corn, and one day, two days running he had found his hand pulling them free at various intervals to drop into a machine that smelled of almonds…

  And later to try to sell a necklace he had never seen to a man he did not know — how had he come by it? How much can I get for this?, these were not his words even though his own lips shaped them…

  And then to stand accosted by two men in blue, frightening men who caused him to collapse and weep, for their uniforms reminded him of home, of the Tonton Macoute, their guns and their machetes. When they took someone away he was never seen again.

  Nothing but questions from these men and their associates. Words. So many words, swarming about him, inside his head, like hornets, and he could only sob and nod his head and tell them yes, yes, he had dropped the pellets into the coffee. Yes, he had stolen them along with jewels.

  Part of him, splinters from the Dorcilus Fonterelle who once lived, longed to tell them more … it was not his fault, he hadn’t wanted to hurt a soul, he was even telling them things he had not done because he had no control over his tongue…

  But he dared not. Even splinters of the past could recognize the threats of present and future. He knew what he was to say, and could offer no more. The djab blanc saw to this, coming into his head as he might walk into a room. And if the djab blanc wasn’t there to hear every question through Dorcilus’s ears, every word from his lips, it was of no matter. No truths could be told. The djab blanc would come later.

  And he would know.

  And he would punish.

  Just as he came now, while the cellblock slept surrounded by cold walls, steel bars. The netherhours alive with only the despairing moans of the mad, the mutterings and the curses of those too enraged to sleep. An island of lost souls, all of them, dumped from a ship of fools.

  Voice of the djab blanc, whispering, whispering. No bars could stop him, no wall shut him out. He passed through steel and brick and bone with equal ease. Such things he whispered, such things, such fearsome promises. Telling Dorcilus what waited this very night if he would only have the courage to act…

  The grave awaited, and Dorcilus need never leave it again after tonight. He could see the wooden coffin in his mind as clearly as he could see the crudely scratched words on the jail cell wall. Empty coffin with the open lid, like a tongue set in a crumbling mouth of black earth, It waits. Come, the path was an easy one, and what would he rather hear for eternity: the sliding of the worms, or the whisper of the devil who held his soul?

  The path was never more clear.

  Dorcilus rose from his cot. Took off his pants, his bared legs like knobby sticks. At the cell door, he looped a pantleg around one bar, tied it tight so it held fast upon the uppermost brace across the doorframe. The other pantleg he knotted around his neck.

  He let his legs buckle as abruptly as if his knees had been broken, and there he dangled, without noise, one leg hitching in violent spasms, foot slapping the cold concrete floor like a dying fish. Like a tightening fist around his throat, with the roar of surf in his head, he was sailing the warm sea for his homeland.

  As his bowels evacuated into his underwear, he thought he could smell its earth, and hear the teeth of the worms, welcome…

  …we have forever…

  welcome

  Chapter 13

  Breach of Containment

  Same old sad story: New competitor enters the marketplace, new competitor can’t hold his own against the big boys, new competitor gets buried. The cautionary tale of the free market economy. Very few found their death throes nudged along by hidden doses of cyanide, but hey … every fable needed a t
wist now and then to keep it interesting.

  And so went the brief life and ignominious times of Caribe Coffee Bags and Carrefour Imports. Justin kept up on it all as a matter of conscience, like the guilt of a mercenary perusing news from the republic he was hired to help overthrow. His sources were varied: the Tampa–St. Pete papers, the New Orleans paper he picked up if spotting a pertinent headline; The Wall Street Journal; the weekly news magazines; talk radio in Tampa and its gallery of well-informed, misinformed, and know-nothings.

  It became old news in less than two weeks.

  For blame had quickly been placed, the guilty found. Justice had been swift, with minimal casualties from the deed. The public had mixed feelings about the poisoner’s jail cell suicide: some happy he’d saved taxpayers the expense of a trial and the inevitable appeals, others feeling cheated out of due process. Ah well, can’t please all of the people, etc. And if little things like motive, and how this mental incompetent had managed to pull off a crude but effective burglary two months earlier, without leaving behind a single clue, had died along with him, there was at least the public’s satisfaction of knowing he was dead. They could breathe sighs of relief, could eat and drink without worry … at least until someone else entertained similar thoughts of madness.

  And what of the marketer wronged, Christophe Granvier? Justin wasn’t sure. The man had quickly gone the way of media obscurity, the curtains closed on his fifteen minutes of infamy. But Justin still wondered, on quieter days of contemplation. In idling traffic on Kennedy, to the office or back home. Or lunch hours when he could get away, whisking a few blocks south to Davis Island, to park at the rocky southernmost rim and gaze out over the bay, the small boats of midday sailors his equivalent of watching pigeons in a park.