by Brian Hodge
Justin nodded as if this were new information. He knew the trick, not through personal experience, but through one-time acquaintances. Close enough.
“My father refused to cooperate with Faconde. He was a very stubborn man, and the money he would have been paid meant nothing to him. I think he knew what would happen even before I did. He tried to send me away but I refused to go. He transferred as much of the plantation’s assets as he could to American banks so that no one in the government could get their hands on them.” Pain had gradually been growing in Granvier’s eyes. “Perhaps he was ready to die. My mother had been dead sixteen years, of tuberculosis. One of my brothers had become a Catholic, then a priest, and was clubbed in the head by a soldier during a demonstration. His mind has been a child’s ever since, and he lives in an asylum. My other brother attended university in France and never returned home. My sister was long married. My father was in pain, daily, his legs. Gout. He never said so, but I now believe he was ready to die. Knowing him as I did, I believe he at least wanted it to mean something. And now he had his cause.
“It was not long after his final refusal to Luissant Faconde that a group of soldiers came speeding up into the mountains. They wasted no time. They shot him as he sat on his own front porch, they shot another two of his foremen who had stayed to fight. Planters often have their private little armies to enforce their rights on their own plantation and the surrounding area, or to rule them altogether, but my father had sent them all away. Only the two most stubborn remained, the ones he could not run off with his temper and his canes. So the army came, and shot them all, and took the plantation so that Luissant Faconde could turn it over to someone he knew would be more cooperative.”
“What about you?” Justin asked. Whispering. “Where were you?”
Granvier set his jaw and looked him straight in the eye. “I ran higher into the hills just the same as the other cowards.”
Justin sank into his chair, sorry he’d asked. Sorry he’d ever wanted to know this entire dismal story.
“I told myself I wanted to live so that someday I might avenge my father and the theft of our land. But these were lies. I was terrified … and I did not want to die.
“I took shelter with peasants here and there, and after I had grown a beard I came down from the hills into Port-au-Prince. I looked quite different, bearded, and Port-au-Prince is an easy city for one man to hide in. The slums are endless, a million people or more. I had gotten over my fear by then, and my temper was high, and soon I found myself in with a group of anti-Duvalier schemers. Despite my ignorance of revolution, there were those who looked to me as a kind of leader — if not in practice, in spirit — because I had come from a family with money, I had been educated in America … and I had suffered. Haitians respect suffering. It was through this group that I met Ruben.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said April, sharply. “You’re saying that the U.S. government had something to do with Jean-Claude Duvalier’s overthrow?”
“It was a consultory arrangement,” Moreno said, easy, matter-of-fact. “Don’t be so naïve. Our government was working with Duvalier himself to get him out. It was our State Department that arranged his flight out on a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, to get him to France.”
Justin shook his head, amazing, just amazing. CIA for sure, this guy, or some other equivalent branch, just as scary and opportunistic. “Playing both ends against the middle.”
“That’s plausibly deniable,” Moreno said with mocking humor.
“When Duvalier fell,” Granvier went on, “Port-au-Prince fell with him, into chaos. There was too much anger in the people, too long suppressed, for it to be a celebration. They … we … took our anger out on those who were left. The symbols of his hold over us. Some say as many as a hundred Macoutes were slaughtered in the streets. The people castrated them. Or cut off their limbs. Haitian legend says this is the only way to kill a loup garou … a werewolf. And then they burned the pieces.”
Justin remembered, dimly, the brutality as reported in the news, recalled seeing a few pictures of dead Macoutes. Actually, only the more presentable ones. Most of the photos had been so grisly that no news organization dared print them.
“Do you know how, in a city, when the electricity goes out, people who would never think of breaking the law can be swept up into sudden madness?” Granvier sounded more philosophical at the moment. “They have been saving their money for, say, a new television. But all around them they now see people smashing windows and taking what they please. So these good people come home with a stolen television in their arms.” Granvier nodded. “So it was with me…
“When Duvalier decided to leave, it came very suddenly. People had been expecting him to flee, for days, but all the time came radio reports, no, he is in power, no, he is not giving in and he never will. Then, all at once, he is gone. No doubt this surprised many of his own ministers as much as it surprised those of us who were waiting for the news. Government ministers who had yet been unable to secure their own safety from the crowds. I cared little for the slaughter of Macoutes. But Luissant Faconde? Some of my new friends and I tracked him to a hotel, where he was preparing to leave the country. He had already transferred a stolen fortune to banks in Europe.
“He was mine to do with as I pleased, this was a gift from my friends. I walked in with a machete, fully intending to kill him and be done with it. But it seemed … too quick.” Granvier’s mouth twisted with a thin smile, a streak of ruthlessness heretofore unsuspected. “Vodoun priests who use their powers for harm are said to ‘serve the gods with both hands.’ They may do good with the right, but with the left they do evil.
“So I cut off Faconde’s left arm midway between the elbow and the shoulder. I did not want him dead, I wanted him alive, so that every day he might remember what he had done, and why he had been called to be punished. I tied a tourniquet around his bleeding stump, then dragged him into the bathroom so he could watch me burn his arm in the tub. And that day was the last I saw of him.”
It got so quiet in the room Justin thought he could hear the blood in his own veins. Christophe Granvier, your classic nice-guy-pushed-too-far; he never would have guessed the man had anything so ferocious inside him.
“The dead chicken you showed us last night. With its wing cut off.” April’s voice was anxious. “It was from Faconde, he’s the one that started all this? He’s here?”
Granvier nodded, tentative. “I believe so, yes.”
Moreno was shaking his head. “Told you you should’ve aimed for his neck instead.”
“How did he even find out about your marketing plans in the first place?” Justin asked.
“Who can say? I was importing coffee beans from Haiti, perhaps he still maintains contact with old associates there, and heard in that way. Or perhaps he was told directly by Andrew Jackson Mullavey or his brother. One or the other is my guess.”
“What’s his connection with the Mullaveys?”
“For sure, I cannot say. But Haiti has a relatively small business class, and one hears things. A few years before the fall of Duvalier, there were rumors that Baby Doc or someone else in his regime had dealings with very powerful men in New Orleans. Not everything was known, I’m sure, but it was said that one of them paid the government several hundred thousand dollars for the export of several dozen Haitians, to work for him.”
“All those workers at his estate?” Justin said. “You’re telling us he bought them?”
Granvier nodded.
Head sagging, weak in the neck, Justin stared toward the tabletop. He had eaten at Mullavey’s table, slept beneath his roof, shot skeet with him.
Had part of his salary paid by Mullavey Foods.
And here it came, in a motel room in Gretna, Louisiana. That sense of 4:00 A.M., every joint below the waist aching, a bad taste in the mouth, and a jaded worldview. So this was what it felt like to be a whore, used and spent.
April’s hand upon his arm, lightly strok
ing, and then an urgent squeeze. She flicked her glance to Ruben Moreno, look.
Moreno sat glaring into his coffee, no longer the unflappable savior from Miami. No. “You never told me this, Christophe,” he said with quiet rage. “You never told me this.”
Granvier looked at him with tranquility. “To what end? Those people are living better lives in this country, on his land, than they would be in their own country.”
Moreno, shaking his head, bristling, “That’s not the point. He’s been exploiting third world slave labor for a decade and he’s gotten away with it?”
“You’re a practical man, Ruben. You deal with practical matters,” Granvier said. “They’re better off. This is as practical as I can explain it.”
“Not right,” Moreno whispered. “That shit’s not right at all.”
April cleared her throat, spoke with the voice of a born arbitrator. “Appalling as that is, I think we’re straying. There’s still one thing I don’t understand. What about the man that was arrested for the poisonings? He was your employee, Christophe. He supposedly confessed to everything and said he acted alone. That’s why the police wouldn’t even consider what Justin had to show them yesterday, because it was a closed case. And I can’t believe that the entire department is covering up for it.”
Granvier was small, sadder than ever. “Dorcilus Fonterelle? Oh, he did it. He did just what he said he had done. I saw him the night after they arrested him, a few hours before he hung himself, and I believe he did that on his own, too. But none of it did he have control over. None of it. He was … not the same man. It was nothing I could report to the authorities, they would have thought me mad. You may believe it, you may not. But I saw him, and I know. Dorcilus Fonterelle’s will was no longer his own. He was under the control of another. In the literal sense of the word … that man was a zombi.”
“The walking dead … ?” Justin said flatly. First images being B-grade movies, actors with slack jaws and blue makeup lurching about, eating the flesh of the living. Somehow it seemed that Fonterelle would have been noticed well in advance.
“Dead … yes, no. Dead inasmuch as his old life was over, and a terrible new life was all he had left.”
“Believe it, there’s plenty basis in reality for it,” said Moreno, back on track. “For decades in Haiti, you’ve got cases where someone’s declared dead, no vital signs at all — at least not detectable by their basic techniques — and they’re buried. Years later they turn up alive somewhere, minds gone to putty. Documented cases, no joke, and no hoax.
“Most of it got figured out scientifically. A guy named Wade Davis — an ethnobotanist from Harvard — was hired by an American pharmaceutical company to go down and check into it, early eighties, I think. They were looking at it in hopes of finding some new wonder-drug anesthesia. Turns out what the witch doctors have been using is a blended poison, a powder. All kinds of shit in it, natural ingredients, some of them really potent. Shavings from human corpse bones, the puffer fish, a poison toad, hallucinogenic plants. You even touch it, or walk on it barefoot … that’s it. It mimics death. You get buried, and it wears off two, three days later … just in time for whoever poisoned you to dig you up again. There’s brain damage sometimes, and you add that to the whole live-burial experience, and the superstitions so many of these people grow up with … and you got people coming back into the world thinking they’re dead. Now whether there’s any mind control beyond that, I can’t really say. I wouldn’t discount it. I’ve spent time in Haiti and in Jamaica, and I’ve seen things I can’t explain.”
“Who, up here, would even have access to that kind of thing?” asked April.
“There was a man — not long after the rumors about the sale of the slaves — who came to Haiti from New Orleans, and became one of the Tonton Macoute,” Granvier said. “It was supposedly connected to the other dealings. He was there for three or four years. I never saw him, but I heard of him. Djab blanc, some called him — white devil. I would guess that he came back here after leaving Haiti.”
Justin looked over at Moreno. “Not one of yours, was he?”
Moreno glared sideways at him, irked. “No, he wasn’t one of ours.”
“Well, whoever you worked for, you can’t tell me that that powder didn’t excite a lot of people outside the pharmaceutical business.”
Moreno suddenly laughed, and it was very nearly with warmth. “You do have a paranoid head, don’t you?” He wiped a grin away with the back of his hand. “Okay, fair enough. Look at it academically. A virtually undetectable topical poison with those results, yeah, that could interest people. You could work it into liquid form, put it in a bottle of aftershave, or a perfume atomizer. Or a dosage inside a tranquilizer dart. It’s got a lot of possibilities. But these bokors that make it … they take their work seriously, recipes like that they guard with their lives. It’s the kind of society that’s, well, more than a little hairy to try and ingratiate yourself. I think you see the difficulties.”
Justin nodded. “Be a challenge, wouldn’t it?”
No barriers there that covert funds couldn’t overcome. Poorest nation in the western hemisphere, it wouldn’t be long before you found a taker to share the secrets. After all, the Mullaveys had apparently managed to tap into it. So he wondered.
They talked for another hour, until Moreno announced that he was going to have them sit tight for a day or two. That he was going to do some fact gathering on the Mullaveys to see if he could find any kind of leverage to exploit. He tossed his suitcase onto Granvier’s bed, opened it, pushed aside some underwear and socks, then pressed a couple of spots to disengage a molded false bottom.
“I’ll leave this here,” he said, and lifted a blue steel pistol from the suitcase. He looked to Justin and April. “Either of you have any firearms training?”
Justin seesawed his hand. “Some. I’m more familiar with a Beretta.” He pointed to the pistol on the bed. “That’s a what?”
“SIG Sauer two-twenty-six nine-millimeter. Fifteen-shot magazine, so your firepower compares to the Beretta, but I like the feel of this better. The Navy SEALS are using these as sidearms now. That’s a pretty high recommendation.”
Justin hefted it for balance, chambered a round and ejected it, ejected the magazine and replaced the round. Been a long time. He slid it across the table to April for her to get the feel of it as well.
Moreno called a cab for the airport so he could leave his rental with them. Gave both Justin and April a business card printed only with his firm’s phone number in Miami. Presumably Granvier didn’t need one.
“Anything comes up, anything at all, you call. Even when I’m someplace where my people on the end of that line can’t phone me, I try to keep in touch at least every ninety minutes. So I’m not that far away from you.”
Moreno stood at the door, restored suitcase at his foot like a compliant pet, waiting until his cab arrived. Justin counted.
He only checked his watch four times.
Chapter 23
The Divine Horsemen
Napoleon’s world had grown comfortingly small again, living here on South Rampart, in a shop owned by the woman called Mama Charity. Free of hurry, safe from harm. Here, perhaps, he could begin growing his hair into the dreadlocks he had wanted for years. Mr. Andrew had always told him no, it wouldn’t do for his chauffeur to look like a rastafarian.
No such thinking here.
Mama’s was a world of bright and dusty mysteries, its shelves packed floor to ceiling with the trappings of remedy and spirits and ritual. Candles of all sizes, in colors of rainbows cheerful and sinister. Bins loaded with roots, like the gnarled fingers of elder gods. Spices common and arcane, cloth bags, bottles tall and small. Jars full of confectionaries of the truly bizarre: black cat bones, rattlesnake fangs, goofer dust said to be gathered from near the tomb of Marie Laveau herself, at midnight, beneath a full moon. Behind the counter were small stacks of curling pictures of Catholic saints, vividly rendered to better sum
mon their mystical strength, and in the air hung a perpetual haze of incense.
Mama Charity had him daily sweep the floors, straighten whatever had been left awry, keep the shelves restocked. Not much, but for these tasks he received a small bed in a back room, most meals, a few dollars in his pocket.
And peace of mind.
He could walk the aisles here and feel the gentle pull of everything around him, as if the candles and potions were benevolent sponges that drew the poisons of worry from his heart. A scent of age — and agelessness — lingered in every corner like the aura of souls, and the whispered comfort of ancient names.
Saturday afternoon, Napoleon straightened a leaning tower of cardboard boxes in a storage room, listened to Mama Charity out front, behind the counter.
“Now you take that root home,” she was saying to a young woman, “and soon as you get there, boil you up some sugar water until it gets just like syrup. Soak that root for twenty-four hours, not a minute less, you hear me? Then wrap it up in red flannel and keep it hid in your purse tomorrow when you go see that man, and when you do, you be just as sweet as that root.”
Napoleon heard the young woman thank her, then the familiar chime of the cash register. Receding footsteps followed by the thud of the door, and he wandered out front.
Mama Charity was smiling after the young woman. “You know what I think I sell the most of? Hope.”
He looked across the aisles, empty. “Slow day.”
“Yep,” said Mama. “For a Saturday, it is.”
“Everyone maybe has enough hope already today, you think?”
“Aaaaaa.” She frowned, then good-naturedly waved him off. “Ain’t nobody can have too much of that.”
She eased into an extra-wide rocking chair in the corner, shut her eyes; wood creaked, slow and rhythmic. In her presence he felt as languid as a cat.