The Darker Saints

by Brian Hodge

  Granvier turned his back on them, down the hall toward the kitchen. Presumably going for the phone. At the open doorway he paused to look in their direction again, the length of the hall.

  “I never asked for your help. But what’s done, is done.”

  He disappeared through the doorway.

  “That’ll make a nice epitaph,” Justin said.

  She frowned and pinched his shoulder. “Don’t say that.”

  He nodded with amused remorse, then shuffled about the hail, restless. Some of his fire was back, and she didn’t have to look close to see that a part of him was enjoying this. He stood at the front door, nudged the blind aside with his nose, far enough to peek out. He let it fall back into place.

  “We can’t stay here either, you know,” he said. “Sooner or later someone’s going to get the idea we might have come here, and I think we can guess what kind of mood they’ll be in.”

  April nodded, not relishing the prospect of sharing more bad news: Sorry, I don’t know how dangerous it was for you before, but now it’s worse for you too… Although surely Granvier understood this already. He had known the type of people set against him better than they did.

  She leaned against the wall, arms folded, listening to the quietly urgent voice drifting from the kitchen. Wondering who was on the other end of the line. Eavesdroppers, the both of them.

  She and Justin smiled broadly at the last thing Granvier said:

  “Oh, and could you bring along a handcuffs key, too?”

  Chapter 22

  To Serve with Both Hands

  Justin awoke first the next morning; discomfort will do that to you. Facedown on the pillow, pretty much the way he’d spent the entire night. By the looks of the sunlight at the window, still weak and anemic, it was early yet. April still asleep beside him, the bed beneath them hard, industrial strength. They’d holed up last night in some budget motel on Highway 61, near the airport. Dreams had been fraught with a jet rush bleedthrough of arrivals and departures. How well had Christophe Granvier slept? He lay on the other side of one wall, accessible through the connecting door between rooms.

  Justin twisted his head on the pillow, hard as well, as if stuffed not with goose down, but beaks and feet. Well, fugitives couldn’t be choosers. His face was inches from April’s, her slow breath and shut-eyed innocence like a window into a calmer world that he needed to visit more often.

  She really had come through last night. Spectacularly.

  Now, if only she’d been able to bite through steel.

  Nearly twelve hours with his hands cuffed behind him, and it was really starting to get maddening. Almost worse, in their own way, were the myriad of small indignities. He’d had to let April take his pants off just to go to bed; the shirt and jacket he was stuck with. When he was thirsty she had to hold the glass, and when he had been hungry late last night, the food. She had to manually aim him when he urinated, and he was really hoping he could hold off the solids until freed, so he wouldn’t have to sit there and let her wipe him like a child in potty-training. Her wicked glee was poorly masked; a mildly sadistic dominatrix had settled in to watch and play.

  He eventually woke her, unintentionally, when twisting for comfort upon the conjugal slab. April sat, topless in her panties, bunched one pillow behind her back and looked down at him.

  “This still looks really kinky,” she said. “I’m thinking it would almost be worth it to leave you like this until the maid comes in. Just to see the look on her face.”

  Justin grumbled, rolled his eyes. “Kiss my ass.”

  She hooked a finger into the waistband of his briefs, yanked them down far enough to expose one pale cheek. April cackled and dived for it, smacked him loudly, then bit. Hard. He bellowed indignation and she sat up, clapping with malevolent delight.

  “Such control!” she waxed with perfect-posture superiority. “Such mastery over another’s fate. Most women aren’t used to this, you know. I think I could really learn to love it.”

  He huffed and held his tongue, let her have her way. Things could be worse. At least she hadn’t thought to spank him. Yet.

  Justin rolled off the bed and onto his feet a few minutes later. Flexed at the knees a few times, up and down, rolled his head to loosen his neck and shoulders. He walked over to look into the mirror over a dresser with scarred veneer. Such a dismaying sight. Cuffed, right eye swollen half-shut, cut and bruised.

  He moaned. “I look like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

  “With no pants and black socks? Oswald looked more dignified.”

  He faced her again. “I have to piss.”

  There, revenge. April hopped off the bed, brightly, ready for duty, and they walked toward the bathroom.

  “Could you do me a favor?” he asked.

  “Name it, love.”

  “Could you first hold your hand under warm water this time?”

  There was a knock at the connecting door after more than an hour. They both were dressed by then, in last night’s clothes and missing the customary change of underwear after the morning shower, although Justin had to pass on the shower, as well. April had flipped around the TV dial, a fruitless hunt for TV news, to see if any mention was made of last night’s breakaway at their hotel. Nothing, just Saturday-morning cartoons. She had once gone to the window, gazed out across the parking lot, said how strange it was going to feel in another hour or so, a Saturday morning and no appointment with Dr. Gurvitz. Not bad strange, just different, a break in routine.

  The door, the knock. April answered, and Christophe Granvier came in trailed by another man wearing a weathered bomber jacket, who entered the room with eyes on smooth alert, as if soaking in every corner, every shadow, every inhabitant, alive and inanimate.

  Granvier introduced Justin and April first, then gave his companion’s name as Ruben Moreno. All Granvier had told them last night after calling the man was that he was a security specialist in Miami, with his own firm.

  “You’re the escaped POW?” Moreno looked at Justin, mundane pleasantries dispensed with entirely. “Turn around.”

  Justin did so, and a moment later his wrists were mercifully unbound; the freedom was exhilarating. He swung his hands around front again, massaged the creases in his wrists, rolled his shoulders, flapped his arms at his sides.

  The cuffs dangled from Moreno’s fingers. “Souvenir?” He tossed them onto the bed, then took the folded newspaper wedged beneath his arm and whacked it into April’s hand. “I picked this up at the airport this morning. Page three. You might find it interesting.”

  While she thumbed to it and read, Justin peeled off his rumpled jacket, looked at Moreno out of the corner of his eye.

  Interesting-looking mix of bloodlines. His skin was a darkly burnished brown; Moreno could easily pass for black, though his hair was fine and wavy, what was left of it. Pattern baldness had nearly cleared the top of his head. His mustache remained thick and heavy. He looked around forty, roughly Granvier’s age, though he stood a few inches shorter, and more compact.

  Justin peered over April’s shoulder. “What’s it say?”

  She scanned a couple more lines to finish the brief article.

  “A whitewash. You were right.” She laughed, read from the article with a touch of incredulity in her voice. “ ‘Both suspects were described as black males, aged between twenty-five and thirty, with Rastafarian-style dreadlocks…’?” She passed the newspaper over to Justin. “Yeah, I’d say somebody filed a false report.”

  He read it for himself, found it to be a reasonably accurate account of last night’s street confrontation, if overlooking their transmogrification into Jamaicans. The pair of detectives remained unnamed, though one had been hospitalized.

  “You broke his hip!” Justin cried with admiration. “Good job, Bonnie.”

  She shrugged with a crinkly, reluctant smile.

  Moreno raised one hand, snapped his fingers twice, attention. “Let’s get this moving, okay? Who checked in last night, whose n
ame’s on the motel register?”

  “I signed in,” said Granvier. “But I paid cash and used a false name.”

  Moreno nodded briskly. “Fine for last night, but we’ve got to get you moved out of here as of now. That other bought cop or somebody else might already be making the rounds, flashing your pictures, and if they do that, it won’t matter what name you signed in under. I’ll get the next rooms and keep you three out of sight. I’ll tell them I’m renting them for out-of-town wedding guests, motels love that shit. Ready to go?”

  It was just that sudden. Two minutes later they were rolling out of the parking lot, in a sedan rented by Moreno. Granvier’s car they left behind; Justin and April’s rental from yesterday had already been left in a lot a mile from Granvier’s house. As long as they didn’t make the mistake of using a credit card, their movements would now be virtually untraceable.

  Moreno headed southeast, toward the city and down, crossed the river into Gretna and rented rooms in a chain motel with cut-rate mass-produced paintings on the walls and little else in the way of personality. After settling in, Moreno had April give him the key to their room in the French Quarter. He came back an hour later with their luggage and the professional assessment that, unless they were extraordinarily sloppy, their room had been searched. Absent, Justin found, were the duplicate disks and printouts he had run from the Caribe files, leaving only those they’d left with Christophe Granvier last night. Moreno had also closed out the room for them. The last thing they needed was to be pegged as deadbeats who’d skipped out with a room key.

  They called a time-out while Moreno ducked away to bring back late breakfasts and Justin took a sorely needed shower.

  He soaked beneath hot spray, let it pound him warm and pink, a corona of shampoo dripping from his head. It stung the cut across his brow, his swollen eye … but pain could be cleansing too.

  April looked in on him, peering around the translucent shower curtain. “What do you think of this guy? Moreno.”

  Justin rinsed soap from his eyes so he could see. “He knows what he’s doing, seems like. And I, for one, sure welcome somebody else’s input.”

  “Did you catch the way he’s always looking at his watch?”

  “Yeah. Like he’s never off some sort of timetable.”

  She nodded. “I think he needs to lighten up. But for our sake, I hope he doesn’t.” April dawdled, sitting on the edge of the tub just out of his spray, tracing loops in the moisture on the tiles. “What do you think his connection with Christophe is? It’s hard to imagine two more different people, Christophe seems so mellow and dignified all the time.”

  “I couldn’t even guess.”

  “You’ve got a bruise on your ribs.” April laid her hand over his slick skin, where the nut-busted cop had kicked him last night — a mottled ache, nothing more. Blinking through steamy runoff, Justin could see renewed melancholy descend over April’s forehead, her eyes, mouth. No mistake, she wanted this to be over, and soon.

  For her sake, he hoped it was. For his own? Now that was a tougher call, wasn’t it? A fibrous core ran very deep, and badly wanted to make Andrew Jackson Mullavey suffer.

  A half-hour later they gathered for breakfast in Granvier’s room, around the standard motel-issue round table. Moreno sipped from a monstrous cup of coffee, and his first order of business after dispensing the food was tossing a pack of Marlboros to Granvier.

  “Keep these for me, will you?” he asked. “Damn if I didn’t buy another fresh pack.”

  “Trying to quit?” Justin asked.

  “Oh, he quit seven, eight years ago, was it?” Granvier said, and Moreno nodded. “This is his test of willpower.”

  “I still crave them. Every day. Sometimes I just have to buy a pack and leave it around to know I’m still in control.”

  “Like an alcoholic keeping a bottle in the cabinet with the seal unbroken,” April said, and Moreno jabbed toward her with his syrupy plastic fork, as if to say, Right, exactly. Her ears had perked up at the mention of seven or eight years. “How long have you known each other?”

  “We first met in the summer of 1985, had substantial contact over the next several months. After that, it’s been far more infrequent.”

  “Met how?” Justin said. “Under what circumstances? It wasn’t in the States, was it?”

  From the very first moment he’d seen them together, he had picked up on a time-tested familiarity that transcended a mere client/hired gun relationship. Not friendship, precisely, more like veterans of the same obscure war.

  Much the same way he would no doubt relate to a Venezuelan rain forest aborigine named Kerebawa, had he survived last year.

  “If you don’t tell them, I will,” Granvier said. Probably the firmest tone he’d heard the man take. “They need to know.”

  Moreno shrugged, mopped up the last of syrup with a wedge of pancake. “I was in Haiti during the last several months of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s reign. Certain government agencies had interests to protect, and some of those interests happened to coincide with various Haitian factions opposed to Duvalier. That’s all.”

  “State Department?” Justin said, knowing it was wrong the moment he had said it. Moreno was no embassy staffer on any level, there was nothing of the smarmy diplomat about him. And he said nothing.

  Another ventured query: “CIA?”

  Moreno looked across the table evenly, patiently. “Why I was there doesn’t matter, and you don’t need to know. I’m retired and I’m a private citizen now, just helping out an old friend.”

  Justin nodded, offered a disarming smile. “Sounds plausibly deniable to me,” and he felt April kick him under the table.

  Moreno nibbled on his lip a moment. “I can understand why Andrew Jackson Mullavey wants to bury you in an unmarked grave.”

  Okay, enough probing. Curiosity was sated. “I’ll shut up.”

  “No, actually. Don’t.” He leaned back with his coffee, checked his watch, quickly peeked out the window around the drawn curtains. “I only have bits and pieces of your story, what brought you up here from Tampa in the first place, why you showed up at Christophe’s door last night. I want you to fill in the gaps.”

  So, taking turns, he and April went through the tale, beginning in July, all the way up through yesterday’s rebuff at NOPD headquarters. The rest, since then, Moreno knew.

  “I don’t have any problem believing Mullavey was somehow behind it, even if I can’t prove it,” Justin said. “But it’s never made any sense to me or April, why he’d even go that far.” To Granvier alone, then: “Magnolia Blossom’s a national brand, Caribe was regional. You couldn’t have been that big a thorn in his side before you even reached the shelves.”

  The silence over the table felt thick as rainclouds. Watching Granvier’s face, Justin was struck as he hadn’t yet been by the disparity of cultures in which they had been raised. The fatalistic resignation with which this man seemed to accept his downfall, as if it had been part of some predestined plan. What inner reserves Granvier must have had. Justin could not see himself, under the same circumstances, reacting with anything other than hatred, bitterness, self-defeat — everything he had tried to overcome in himself.

  “It is true,” Granvier finally said, “I had no thought to marketing my own coffee in this way until I heard of his plans. I don’t know why I decided to follow his lead, really, I don’t. Perhaps I took it as a challenge. But it does not matter.” His voice had been wistful, but now he grew somber. “What they did to me is not as it appears to you. It has nothing to do with selling coffee. It has everything to do with revenge.”

  Granvier took his own empty orange juice container, pointed at Moreno’s huge coffee cup. “May I? A bit?” Moreno said okay, and Granvier poured off a little, sipped, grimaced. “Dreadful. I wonder if they even used a filter.”

  Moreno shrugged. “It’s fuel.”

  Granvier held the rest up, swirled the cup and gazed into it as if it were the home of an oracle. “Thi
s did start it all, though. Coffee.” He sighed, set the cup down and didn’t touch it again. “The government of Haiti has generally been corrupt on many levels. Until the army overthrew him two months ago, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the first truly decent leader Haiti has had in generations. Life under the Duvaliers was all I remember — Francois came to power when I was six years old — and under both the father and the son, there was no such thing as a middle class. You have peasants living in the dirt, you have the destitute living in city slums, and you have the wealthy leaders who feed off the rest as do vultures. Most of them are mulattoes. They think themselves better for that.

  “I came from a wealthy family that owned a coffee plantation over four generations. But our skin was black — all black — and we came from the dirt, and this was no secret, and there were plenty who looked down upon us for that.

  “Now as I said, the government, particularly the Duvaliers’ regime, was corrupt on many levels. Enemies often turned up dead. And everything for them and their officials was a chance for profit. Jean-Claude’s wife, Michèle, established a foundation in her name, supposedly to provide aid to poor mothers and their children. She instead used it as her personal bank account, to draw millions for her own use. This is but one example of many.”

  “Caring people,” April said.

  “Michèle’s own family was a shady bunch of mulattoes, and many of them were involved with cocaine traffic. So were others in the regime, including a man named Luissant Faconde. He was a governmental minister of coffee exports. In 1985, Luissant Faconde developed a plan to line his own pockets. He wanted a share of the harvest from each of the coffee growers so that he might roast it, and export it to the United States from his own company. Coffee growers export their beans just as they’ve been harvested, and let the buyers do the grinding and the roasting, but Faconde wished to process them in Port-au-Prince. Then, mixed in with the roast, he would ship bags of cocaine.”

  Moreno jumped in. “Same thing happens here on a lesser scale, smugglers in vans or whatever. They want to move a few kilos, cut down some of the risk, they’ll pack them in coffee. Dope-sniffing dogs can’t pick up the scent then.”