Four more nights and Tam-Tam Boy would give her Pioche’s body for burial. And every night until then she would ride with Etienne to the houngan’s temple on Morne Mansinte. She needed Tam-Tam Boy to convince Pioche’s soul to enter the holy ground.
Hettie was angry with Pioche for trying to help the women. Why would he risk his life and those of his family over someone he didn’t even know? Why couldn’t Pioche take his own good advice about minding one’s business?
Nothing seemed quite clear to Hettie since Pioche’s body was found.
She got into the pickup and strained to pull the rusty door closed. The frame squeaked on the axles and road dust filled the cab through holes in the floorboard. One of the truck’s headlights was centered on the narrow mountain road, the other shot up against the bank, illuminating the tangle of roots eroding beneath a half dozen dilapidated shanties.
She thought about Pioche’s father. Pioche never spoke of him, but many times she had seen him take the picture of his father down and cradle it in his lap. She didn’t intrude; she often reflected on her own mother’s picture at night when her husband and daughter were asleep. She’d thought that Pioche must have simply been doing the same. Now she had to wonder if the picture meant something else.
Etienne dropped her and her daughter at their house before midnight. He would be going to the market in Port-à-Piment the following morning to sell plantains. Tomorrow her daughter, Yousy, would go with him, her first day back at the Jesuit school since her father had been killed.
Hettie entered the dark house and felt its emptiness. Something about it had changed.
The picture of Amaud wasn’t a very good one, a yellowing Polaroid taken on his sixtieth birthday in Port-au-Prince. Amaud had worked as a domestic for a wealthy Canadian family. He’d died from a stray bullet during the riots, the same year the picture was taken. The frame around it was several inches too large, crudely made of bamboo and glass. A patch of old cloth was tacked across the cardboard backing. It was the thickness of it that Hettie noticed first. The padding between the glass and cardboard was wide enough to hold fifty pictures of Amaud.
But it wasn’t pictures she found inside. It was money, nearly five thousand dollars. Pioche had been rich! She was rich!
She turned to look out the window: purple sky above Morne Mansinte. It was darker at night than it had ever seemed in her childhood. The poor were now too poor even to burn firewood. All the trees, even the fruit-bearing trees, had been cut for the few measly dollars’ worth of charcoal.
In the mountains, however, the rich owned generators large enough to light a whole village. Haiti was like that, a country of contradictions, the rich as unproportionally rich as the poor were unproportionally poor. One in every eighty thousand lived in opulence, which seemed wrong enough without adding to the fact that they felt entitled to murder the poor.
Pioche hadn’t had to die. All those years Pioche had been sitting on a fortune. Why would he have worked so hard to live in such squalor, to eat fish and fruit off the trees when they could have lived in Les Cayes in virtual splendor?
She turned and looked around the little house, at the image of President Préval on the wall where it could easily be seen. It wasn’t really a photograph but was cut from the front page of the National Catholic Reporter, one that Yousy had brought back from the marketplace in Port-à-Piment.
She turned the picture of Amaud over and put the money back in. Then she laid it on the bed and sat next to it.
This had been her own mother’s home, destroyed by countless hurricanes over the years and rebuilt by the fishermen who had been regenerating this village since slaves won their freedom from Napoleon. The collective memories of those fishermen, her mother, herself, were all a bittersweet muddle of happiness and pain. Haiti was as wondrous as it was cruel, its people the same. In the corner on an overturned bucket was a stack of Yousy’s schoolbooks. Hung from a string on the wall where her daughter slept was a poster from USAID. Yousy’s dream was to attend college in the United States. It had been her dream ever since she had begun to attend school with the Jesuits in Port-à-Piment. USAID offered a scholarship program to Haitian children turned sixteen.
Hettie looked at the poster until she could no longer see for her tears. Then she smiled.
Pioche had been thinking about Yousy.
He had been saving the money to send Yousy to America.
18
CONTESTUS
HAITI
There were two meetings in Contestus that evening and the staff was visibly shaken. Men with strange accents spent the afternoon walking the floors, moving from room to room with countersurveillance equipment. Some watched monitors on laptops supported by neck straps. Others used wands to sweep air-conditioning ducts, electrical plugs, lamps, telephones, and panels over light switches. An equal number was combing the grounds with portable microwave dishes.
Bedard had found plenty to worry about this last week. He was thinking he had already stayed at Contestus too long.
He refused to have a conversation with anyone, even the most trusted of his staff, until the castle was swept for listening devices. One could never be sure if one of his staff had left a little present from some intelligence agency with a spy satellite or an offshore fishing trawler crammed with eavesdropping equipment. One could never be sure of anyone’s motives for doing anything these days. Not in Haiti. It was a dog-eat-dog world.
Perhaps the incident at sea with Jill Bishop was an accident. Perhaps no one had intentionally plotted to draw attention to him. Perhaps he was unnecessarily paranoid and his fear that the Americans were always just around the corner was all in his mind.
They had gone over this months ago in a meeting at his estate in Colombia. Thiago Mendoza was lying dead in his casket in Barranquilla and the cartel was introducing Mendoza’s son Sergio to the principals of the organization. There was nothing to suggest that Bedard’s operations were receiving more or less attention from law enforcement in the last year. No unusual boardings or heightened inspections of his cargo ships around the world. Nothing even to suggest there might be subterfuge in the ranks, a condition he credited entirely to the alarming reputation of his chief of security, Matteo, and soldiers, all former members of the Tonton Macoutes. But there was tension in Colombia following Thiago Mendoza’s death, and Bedard had the castle swept twice before Thiago’s son Sergio set foot on Haitian soil. The young man had wanted to see this aspect of his father’s business as well. How and where the cartel’s women, trafficked from Eastern Europe, were being introduced to the West.
And Bedard wanted to make certain that Mendoza’s Colombian rivals didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. Bedard wanted to ensure he didn’t go down in history for hosting the event that killed the world’s twenty-second-richest man.
A steel door swung open and Bedard walked in. For all his years Bedard could instill fear when he entered a room.
He still wore the black accouterments of the Tonton Macoutes and a pearl-handled Colt .45 on his hip. He removed the thick-framed opaque sunglasses so long associated with the Tonton Macoutes—it was no lie that Papa Doc had wanted his secret police to wear sunglasses day and night to fuel rumors that they were dead men brought back to life as zombies; that behind the dark glasses their eyes had no light.
Bedard laid the glasses on the table. He wanted these men to look into his eyes. He wanted them to see his anger. His dark hands trembled with it. A pale scar, which halved one cheek, began to slide back and forth as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.
Matteo, Bedard’s bodyguard, pulled the door closed behind. Bedard, tall and menacing, looked down at them with his one good brown eye. His white eye, the glass eye, never moved. At last he took the seat at the head of the table. The smell of his sweet cologne settled around the room.
The pudgy middle-aged man sitting nearest him was sweating streams from his brow that coursed behind his ears to drench his collar. He was nervous and the smell of Bedard’s s
kin made his stomach sour. He reached for the water pitcher, hoping he wouldn’t get sick, but then thought better of it, retrieved the hand, and placed it on his lap. To have water might be construed by Bedard as a sign that he felt at ease, and this evening Philippe felt anything but.
A plasma screen on the wall came to light playing a taped news broadcast showing a reporter standing in front of an old brick building in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica.
Matteo turned up the volume with a remote. “…Sources from the Jamaica Constabulary have confirmed that the body of a young Caucasian woman was recovered in the Jamaica Channel this morning. Jamaica Defence Force launches have been sent to check the area for possible wreckage due to a boating accident. Police say a photograph is forthcoming. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard will take a second look into the murder investigation of soccer coach Bob Woolmer, found in his hotel room at the Jamaica Pegasus last…”
The screen went black.
Bedard’s nose glistened with oil. His ears were sharply pointed and seemed too small for his body.
“Someone speak!” he shouted. Veins continued to pulse along his neck and raised the temples on either side of his forehead.
“She jumped, patrón,” the man sitting next to him said. “I couldn’t stop her.”
Bedard’s head swiveled to the old security guard. “Jumped,” he repeated. “Jumped you say, Philippe?”
The security guard nodded vigorously. “There was nothing I could do, patrón.”
“Who opened the door, so she could…jump?” Bedard asked. “Are you telling me she opened the door of the airplane herself?”
Philippe sighed, clasped his hands before him as if in prayer, and raised and lowered the mass of twisted fingers and fists. “It was hot, patrón, and I opened it to keep her from being sick.”
Bedard snapped open a gold cigarette case and removed an American cigarette.
“Is that right?” Bedard put the cigarette in his mouth, waited for Matteo to step forward with a lighter and light it.
“When it is hot in the airplane you open the door?” Bedard looked at the pilot, then back to Philippe.
The pilot sitting at the opposite end of the table looked at his hands and finally shook his head.
The security guard squirmed in his seat, but did not speak.
“What happened then?” he directed the question to the pilot.
“He was playing with her, Commandeur.”
“Playing?” Bedard repeated, looking at the security guard, then back at the pilot.
“Scaring her, Commandeur. Philippe wanted her to strip. He told her he would throw her out of the plane if she didn’t strip.”
Bedard raised a hand to silence the pilot, turned to face Philippe.
“Why don’t you tell me the story, Philippe? What were you doing with the girl?”
The old guard shrugged and exhaled a great sigh as he looked up at the ceiling. “I just wanted to see her body.”
“You wanted to see her body?” Bedard repeated.
The guard nodded. “I was only playing with her a little, patrón.” Philippe used the thumb and finger of his right hand to demonstrate how little.
There was a sound, a human growl.
“But she is dead,” Philippe said, holding out the palms of his open hands. “She cannot tell anyone anything, patrón. I will pay you for her.” He tried to smile, the salt of his sweat stinging his eyes that he dared not reach for to wipe or dry.
“You will pay me,” Bedard repeated flatly. The smell of his skin seemed to ripen with his agitation. “Do you know what she is worth, Philippe?”
Philippe shook his head sadly.
“Fuel the plane,” Bedard said to the pilot menacingly. “You will take Philippe to the compound in Santa Marta.”
Bedard turned to Philippe. “You will stay in Colombia until the rest of us arrive.”
Philippe looked around the room, unsure of himself at first, then a broad smile formed on his face and there was an audible sigh of relief. He leaned forward to shake Bedard’s hand, wet shirt peeling noisily from the back of the leather chair.
“Yes, patrón, thank you, patrón.”
Bedard ignored the guard’s outstretched hand and rose from his chair. “Wait upstairs,” he said to Philippe, and the pilot and the grateful men nearly ran from the room.
When they were gone, Bedard turned to his bodyguard.
“What do you wish me to do, Commandeur?”
“Go with them, Matteo. When you are off the coast of Colombia, throw Philippe from the plane. Then come back to Port-au-Prince and look into this matter of the colonel.”
“Yes, Commandeur.”
“How soon until the explosives are set in place?”
“We began drilling again this morning. The new man says we will be ready in three days.”
“Make it two and put jet-boats in Tiburon harbor. I want them armed and ready to move.”
19
KINGSTON, JAMAICA
Sherry Moore gripped the arms of her seat as the Air Jamaica flight bounced along the runway, turbines reversing thrust to break the jet’s speed. She might have been grateful to know she’d missed seeing the skeleton of a burned-out DC-9 pushed off into the jungle at the end of the tarmac.
“You should feel quite at home, I suspect,” Brigham growled, reaching for the computer bag between his feet and turning on his cell phone.
“Home?” Sherry asked.
“The temperature, the goddamned ninety degrees.”
She smiled. He was talking about the temperature in Kingston, of course, the stewardess’s announcement a minute before. Sherry loved the heat, actually flourished in it, if such a thing were possible.
They taxied for a minute, then coasted to a ramp outside customs.
Twenty minutes later they were streetside and getting into the back of a marked taxi.
“The chapel at the University of the West Indies Hospital.” Brigham’s face was beaded with sweat, his arms sticking to the dirty plastic upholstery. The radio was blasting reggae. A stick of incense burned from a clip on the dash. The smell was sickeningly sweet.
“Our man will meet us at the hospital chapel, the Mona campus; he says we won’t attract attention there.”
“What does he sound like?” she whispered cautiously, but the music was so loud that the driver could not hear.
“Jamaican,” Brigham said flatly.
“Well, he must be an important Jamaican”—Sherry ignored Brigham’s grumpiness—“if he’s trying to avoid the press.”
Brigham had to laugh. “I think he was worried about you, my dear.”
Sherry put her head against the seat rest.
In fact she had been thinking about the press this morning. She couldn’t leave her driveway without telephones ringing around Philadelphia and everyone wondering where she was going.
She wore frameless sunglasses and a white baseball cap with the bill pulled low over her forehead. Sherry didn’t use a walking stick unless she was alone or on unfamiliar ground, so it wasn’t always immediately apparent she was blind. Adding to the effect, she was fit and quite agile on her feet, and while she couldn’t rely on it entirely, Sherry was making small advances in echolocation, a means of determining her direction of travel by listening for the returning echoes off objects around her.
The cab dropped them in front of the university chapel. A walkway led them from the street to a trio of great arches and the welcoming shade of a portico.
A man stepped from the shadows when they appeared and extended a hand. “Miss Moore”—he smiled—“I am Inspector Rolly King George.”
Sherry also smiled and took the hand. “Thank you for meeting us, Inspector. This is my friend Garland Brigham.”
Brigham nodded and grabbed the Jamaican’s fist.
“Please call me Rolly,” the inspector said. “I have a car at the curb and we haven’t much time. There is a woman at the morgue who wishes to see the body and the prime minister herself has as
ked that she be given access. She is the American woman, Carol Bishop.”
“Carol Bishop is here on the island?” Sherry asked, surprised.
“She has been living in the Dominican since her daughter went missing last spring. When she heard on the news we pulled a young woman’s body from the water she took the next flight.”
Sherry nodded. Everyone knew the Jill Bishop story.
“Is there any chance it’s her?”
“Her face is badly marred, Miss Moore, she hit the water at over a hundred miles an hour, but yes, there are physical similarities. Body weight and hair color.”
“Does the press know she’s here?”
“No, Miss Moore, I took precautions, just as I reasoned I should not meet you at the airport.” The inspector sounded apologetic. “It is why I didn’t want you to go through the front doors of the hospital. No one knows the body is here, only the people in pathology and us.”
“What if it is her?” Sherry asked. “You know what will happen if this is Jill Bishop in your morgue.”
Brigham knew what she was thinking, that this was about to turn into a media circus and she had no desire to be caught in the middle.
“You understand, Inspector, that if Mrs. Bishop identifies the dead girl as her daughter the FBI will get involved. There will be nothing I can do here. The FBI won’t let me within a mile of her.”
“What will be, will be.” The inspector nodded. “But you have talked to Helmut Dantzler?”
“Yes, and he wouldn’t have anticipated this either. He would never have sent me here if he thought there was a chance the woman might be identified so soon.”
“No offense meant, Miss Moore, but I am surprised he sent you here at all. Helmut Dantzler does not strike me as the kind of man that would contemplate the supernatural.”
“Perhaps Helmut Dantzler is more complicated than you realize,” Sherry said.
“But you are even more complicated, I am told,” George said.
Sherry shook her head, smiled. “I don’t know what you heard, Inspector, but I’ll be happy to clear up any misconceptions. What I do is very simple. I try to see what someone was thinking about in the seconds before they died. Sometimes I can do this, sometimes not. To be frank, Inspector, I told Mr. Dantzler I wouldn’t be hopeful that someone free-falling to their death would be thinking about old memories. I’m not saying they wouldn’t, I’m just stating the obvious. I don’t know what her state of mind was when she came out of that plane, but one could assume it was consumed by terror.”
Lost Girls Page 14