I stand to make sure I’m free. “You guys don’t believe that devil bullshit.”
“Remember where you are, Bill. It’s ne what we believe that matters.”
“Swell. Why tell me?”
“Because knowing may keep you alive and sane, readin’ Eddie O’Hare’s clues.”
Anne and Siri prep to leave.
Outside the cathedral, the crowd erupts. Siri cuts to the sacristy doorway as a rebel rushes through. He gushes Kreyol. Siri answers, then shouts orders at a woman rebel rushing in. The woman skids-stops, turns, and runs back into the nave.
Siri says, “Sistah is on the balcony preparing to hang her bishop. And the nuns. Blacken your faces and hands; my adjutant will bring you fatigues. We leave for the boat dock in five minutes.” Siri rushes out, presumably to save the nuns and raise the curtain on the Rebelyon blood theater she and Sistah are producing.
Anne grabs her fatigues and throws me mine. The fatigues don’t fit, but the caps are wearable, as are the red armbands. Anne uses gun oil to blacken her skin. Gonna be ugly out there on the square when the UN forces get sucked in; lots of gunfire from lots of directions. All to see who owns a city that might not last till lunchtime.
Siri returns, her face hard and purposed. “We go.”
And we do, taking a rear passage out of the cathedral compound onto a street that skirts the square’s eastern edge. The air tastes like burning rubber. Sporadic gunfire bangs and pops in the crowd. Asylum voices shriek and chant:
“IDA-MAN-TE!”
“IDA-MAN-TE!”
In the square, four UN vehicles are on fire. Six UN soldiers are sprawled at the tires. A thousand black faces press toward the front balcony of Cathedral Notre Dame. Idamante! flags and banners are now everywhere. Hands and arms jab weapons at the sky. Bodies of national police litter the cobblestones, their boots and weapons gone.
“IDA-MAN-TE!”
“IDA-MAN-TE!”
Gunmen bristle along the cathedral’s rooftop and turrets. Between the turrets, a white Idamante! banner unfurls down to the balcony. In front of the banner, Sistah, dressed as a nun and backed by five rebels, faces the jeering crowd. Two of the rebels push the bishop forward and cinch a noose to his neck. He’s naked other than his tall miter hat.
Anne stops to look. Siri grabs her arm to keep moving, and Anne jerks it back. Anne’s glare is full murder. “You killed Sistah, allowin’ her up there.”
“Sistah’s a Rebelyon gurl; she chose Ayiti’s freedom no matter the cost.”
On the balcony, Sistah raises a saber two-handed and yells a mix of French and Kreyol: “The devil is no more!” She wheels and buries the saber in the bishop’s stomach. The rebels push him off the balcony. He falls ten feet, then jolts at the bottom of his rope. His feet swing next to the two UN soldiers already hanging above the cathedral’s main doors.
The crowd roars. Sistah strips the nun’s habit to her rebel fatigues, then the bandanna from her face. The birthmarks radiate bold across her eyes.
The crowd is stunned silent.
A woman yells: “The marks! Ezili Dantor! Ezili Dantor!” She falls to her knees. Hundreds more follow.
Sistah produces another saber and jabs the sky. “Ezili brings you the storm! Ezili brings you FREEDOM! Ezili brings you IDAMANTE!”
The crowd roars.
Sistah kicks a hacked black pig’s head off the balcony. The head knocks the bishop aside and splatters on the cobblestones beneath him. Sistah yells, “RE-BEL-YON!”
“REBELYON!”
“REBELYON!”
Mobs of people surge in from the outer streets toward the square. Anne, Susie, and I knife through against the flow and to the boulevard.
At the seawall, the boulevard is still jammed with tap-taps and would-be refugees. Harbor water blows over the wall and splatters buses. Four hours ago, the harbor was calm enough for our dinghy. Siri points left, away from the main harbor and the mobbed UN container ship. We run the loud diesel-choked boulevard until the pavement crosses over a small canal and the boulevard becomes “the Carenage.”
A sheltered cove docks the Esmeralda. Four ferocious-looking men and women in civilian clothes guard her, each with an AK-47. Siri speaks to one man; they sync their watches, then test their radios. Anne jumps aboard, fires the Esmeralda’s engines, checks the gauges, and waves for us to follow.
On the deck are three more AKs, a box of magazines, two pistols, three marine flashlights, and a short-handled military hatchet. There’s also what looks like a box of hand grenades. One of the women rebels hands me a heavy coil of rope as I step aboard. Another rebel hands Siri a pulley.
Anne yells over the noise, “Buckle in tight,” and points toward the loud pitch-dark ocean we can’t see. A high white line materializes in the black. Spindrift? Three seconds later the shore lights reflect the eight-foot wave underneath the white line. The wave crashes into the seawall and splatters us and our shore guards.
Anne shakes off the foam and yells over shoulder, “Cast off. She’ll only be gettin’ worse.”
***
We’re outside Cap-Haïtien’s protected bay, running blind on instruments through open ocean. Anne, Siri, and I are buckled in three-across behind the Esmeralda’s windshield. Anne yells over the constant collisions and engine roar. “Wind’s gustin’ forty; be three times that when Lana crosses the mountains, so loud you won’t hear it.”
Siri shouts, “Four miles more and we’ll be at the channel into Fort Liberté Bay. Batterie de l’Anse and Prison Labouque guard the channel mouth. The fortress is deserted, but the Gryphon’s night-howler lookouts control her.”
“Huh?”
Siri shouts back, “When the Gryphon’s pirates take a large prize in the Windward Passage or a yacht from the Turks and Caicos, they bring the boat and its occupants through the channel, then back west past the ‘Isle of Souls’ and into the deep-water section of the mangroves.”
We crash waves for another three miles that seem like a hundred. A glow in the black—off the starboard bow—becomes three dim lights.
Siri yells, “Prison Labouque. The lights are the Gryphon’s; he expects traffic.”
“Us?”
“No one else would be out. Before you landed, all of Haiti knew you two were coming.”
Anne yells, “Not just us. The Gryphon draws any ship in distress to this coast. Attacks ’em in his channel; hard to maneuver. Bad weather is good huntin’.” She points one hand at the weapons. “Cinch in tight. Get those AKs up and ready. We’ll go in dark, hug the west side, try to stay off the rocks.”
I reach for an AK; a wave pounds me back into my seat. “You know this channel, right?”
“No. But on the east side they’ll board us. Use nets to foul the props.”
I squint at fortress lights high up on the east side.
Anne points us to the AKs. “Should we foul, don’t be taken off this boat alive.”
The lights at Prison Labouque get brighter. We fight another five minutes of pounding ocean, then Anne yells: “Ready!”
Heart rate pounds my chest. Siri and I lift the AKs, safeties off, fingers on the receivers, our seat belts the only things holding us on the seat. Anne points at the lights of the cannon battery that fronts the fort. “We’re downwind of the fort. If the Gryphon has no one on the west side—” Anne veers the Esmeralda hard right and into the channel. “Shit! I’m too far east—”
Lightning rips through the black. “Look out!”
Medieval battlements tower over us, high, black, and terrifying. Thunder hammers just as the waves cut by half. The Esmeralda’s stern bucks high, caught in a following sea. Anne jams the throttles. Lightning strikes the medieval battlements, then leaps the length of the fortress wall.
Anne spins the wheel hard right. Siri and I whiplash like dolls. We re-aim our AKs at the fort. Any cl
oser and the props will foul in the pirates’ nets. The following sea grabs us again before we can foul. We slide broadside, deep into the channel. Anne yells: “Dig, ya maggots!” and spins left.
Behind us, the channel’s mouth has been splash-lit with marine lights. Siri and I jerk the AKs to the lights—
“There!” Anne jabs her hand west at the opposite shoreline. “To starboard!”
The channel has narrowed. Siri is already unbuckled and aiming over my head. I’m frozen to port, transfixed by the prison’s battlements and the lightning. The following sea fishtails us. Anne fights to mid-channel and yells, “Gettin’ wider!”
Both shorelines fade to dark. The water calms.
Anne snakes the Esmeralda through a mile of black, staring only at her gauges. Dead ahead, dim lights glow in the hidden bay. I punch Anne’s shoulder. She looks up, then far ahead at the lights. “Fort Liberté, what’s left of the town. South rim of the bay. About a mile.”
Siri says: “UN landed Spanish marines there, could not hold it against the Gryphon’s pirates. Pulled out to support Cap-Haïtien against the Rebelyon.”
The wind picks up from our left. Anne says, “We’re into the bay.” She veers the Esmeralda ninety degrees to the right, away from the distant lights. “Our island’s dead ahead. Maybe a half mile. She’s mid-bay; I’ll circle her once. We’ll anchor alee, swim in.”
I pull out Eddie O’Hare’s poem, hold it under the gauge lights.
That’s the well.
It’s the vintner’s well. We can trust him.
We can also trust the vintner’s ‘hare contraire.’ No idea what that is. Maybe that’s the marked brick we’re hoping is inside the well—Mackandal’s mark, a turtle, or a contrarian rabbit.
The last two lines of the verse are:
Don’t trust either one. Like I’ll somehow meet them inside the well? And have to decide?
A windblown tree line silhouettes in the dark—the island. Anne veers left and begins to circle from thirty feet out. Wind muffles our engines. Siri and I aim AKs, squinting at the island’s mangroves. Anne slows the boat and tells Siri, “Ready the anchor.”
Anne squints off the port bow at the barely visible shoreline, then stops the engines. “Drop anchor. Leave your pistols on the boat. Take the rope, pulley, the AKs, and the lights.” Anne touches her pistol to her head, eyes cold and hard. “No prisoners; them or us. The Gryphon doesn’t get us. We shoot each other.”
Siri and Anne hit fists and we go over the side.
The water’s warm and to our shoulders. We wade in toward shore on the island’s leeward side, AKs overhead, aimed at the island’s outline. I’m in the lead and stop in knee-deep water. The beach is a five-foot ribbon of sand, then rocks, then mangroves.
Behind me, Anne and Siri split ten feet apart. Anne shines her flashlight into the trees. We wade north, parallel to the beach. Anne’s light tracks the shoreline’s sand, rocks, roots, and trees. The light lands on an opening in the trees.
Anne waves me in toward the opening, then cuts her light.
I rehoist the rope coil around my shoulders, grip my light tight under the AK’s barrel, and crouch-step out of the water onto the beach and into the opening, finger tight on the trigger.
The opening is five feet wide and walled with dense mangrove thatch . . . like walking inside a snake. The path is soft sand and rises as I go deeper inland. Insects cloud my light beam. Partial footprints appear in the sand.
I stop, try to listen for something other than wind. The path is too wide for wild pigs or big lizards. It was man-made—for carrying water from a well. Anchor alee out of the waves and wind, carry empty barrels in, cart the full barrels back down a wide path. I turn to tell Anne we got lucky.
Anne’s not there. Nor is Siri.
I duck, cut the light, and listen. The dense thatch blocks the wind. A light blinds me.
Anne yells “Don’t!” before I can fire. Her light quits. She scrambles to me, then whispers: “The trail splits, we took the fork. Firepit. Rhum bottles, fish bones. Been used, recently.”
I start back up the path, light and AK aimed at . . . The path turns; my light hits an inverted metal cross nailed into deadwood barricading the path. I shine behind the cross to a sandy clearing. It stinks of rotten eggs. The clearing has . . . seats?
Anne reaches my shoulder. “See anything?”
Headshake.
She sniffs. “Sulfur. Cut your light.”
I do. Everything shrinks to my skin. Anne tells my ear, “Walk careful to the cross, then in behind it five more paces. Listen for two minutes, then turn on your light and shine a circle.”
Bait.
Hell with it, one of us has to. I take four blind steps to the cross, feel my way in behind it, then count five more paces into the dark and stop; nothing but claustrophobic black. The rotten-egg stench hurts my eyes. Pirates could be right next to me, their tongues out . . . Insects buzz. The wind has quit. I shut my eyes; try to listen; try not to shit in my pants. Two minutes pass.
I flip on the light and begin the 360—only mangrove trunks appear in the narrow beam, then more mangroves, sand, then plastic drums labeled “H2SO4.” Beyond it, a huge vat, then large hog-wire cages and long tables made of scrap wood, then scarecrows—ragged, stained clothes draped on stakes.
Anne’s and Siri’s lights flash on. I stumble backward. The lights fan the crude equipment, then quit.
“Bill.” Anne’s voice is next to me. “Cut your light.”
I point it at the ground. Siri steps to my other side, AK tight to her shoulder. She toes at the burned wood under the vat, speaks Kreyol to the scarecrows, then looks up into the trees and the black-dark bay beyond. “All these years, the Gryphon’s boutique osseuse is true.”
I aim my AK one-handed. “Boutique osseuse?”
“Bone shop.” Anne’s light scans the perimeter. Over her gun barrel, she whispers, “Beggars disappear from Cap-Haïtien, AIDS people, and the dead from the graveyards. Complete skeleton brings $1,000 in the med schools of Europe and America.”
“This island’s a red-market rendering plant?”
“Aye. AIDS made blood from Haiti worthless. Captives and the infected go into this bay staked in these hog-wire cages. Fish and crabs feed on ’em until the body is loose bones and mush. Boil the skeletons, add acid, or lay ’em out in the sun, bleach ’em up to medical white, rinse in fresh water from our well.”
My light shines on another path. “There, to the left of the tables.” I point into the trees and a way out of a human rendering plant. “I’ll take point. Warn me this time if you two sidetrack.” Deep breath. I step out of the stench. The path stays five feet wide and leads higher. My cheek sweats against the AK, finger on the trigger, flashlight under the barrel. My toe catches on a root. No prisoners. Shoot anything that moves—
Shape in the path.
I fire. Three AK rounds splinter the trees. No shape in the path, only shadows. Tired eyes. The path curves hard left. I cut the light and duck into the sandy curve. No attack. I remain ducked and flick on the light. The path leads higher, mangroves on both sides, roots and rocks to trip over.
Uphill, the path narrows to four feet, then three, then . . . ends?
No, just overgrown.
I continue through the scrub, twisting sideways. Trees rip my shirt. Roots grab at my feet. The trees thatch tighter into a woven wall. My toe stubs again; I lose the light. The flashlight lands, shining on . . .
A pile of bricks? Ship’s ballast bricks? Long ago they were the pavers used for New World streets. I grab the light and splash a tight 360. Trees and scrub block the beam. More ballast bricks are in the sand; could be a trail to—There. The bricks form a square . . . hole? The ninety-degree corners of a high brick rim? Holy shit. The well.
“Up here! I found it.”
Lights bou
nce through the mangroves. Anne and Siri snake through the thatch into the small sandy clearing. We shine our lights into the well. Three-foot square. Old ballast bricks down all four sides. No bottom. I drop the rope coil, wipe sweat, and ask: “Who’s going?”
Siri says, “I am the lightest.”
Anne and I agree without hesitation.
“But I am not going.”
I hate the whole fucking concept of a water-well tubular-torture chamber, but I’m not staying on a human-slaughterhouse island a minute longer than necessary. “Hack down a tree, make a crossbeam for the pulley. I’ll go.”
Anne pulls the military hatchet and attacks a six-inch mangrove. I run the rope through the pulley. Doesn’t fit. Won’t fit. “Fuck. Cut two mangroves; the pulley doesn’t work.”
We make a loop-seat rig I’ve had to make on construction sites, anchor the rope in nearby trees, test it, then coil it over Anne’s crossbeams. Good to go. Anne hands me a Ka-Bar knife and takes my AK. I weave my belt through the flashlight’s grip, then rebuckle and glance at Siri. I’m guessing she doesn’t trust me anything like Anne trusts her. And I have to trust them both.
I climb into the loop, wedge my back against a corner of the well and my ruined Top-Siders against the opposite corner. “Gimme six feet.”
They do. I crab down the well until the rope tightens and stops. Test . . . a little weight . . . a little more . . . all my weight. The crossbeams creak. Total dark wherever my light beam isn’t, like floating over an abyss that wants to eat you.
Six feet into the well, I shine my light beam across ballast bricks, moss, dirt, spider webs.
Nothing looks like a clue. “Drop me to twelve.”
The rope slackens. I descend deeper, feet and back tight to the walls. The air begins to stale. I shine the flashlight above my right foot on the new section of wall twelve feet down the well. Nope. Then the new section above my left foot. Nope.
I slowly switch sides of the shaft, bracing my way around until I can shine the light on the two walls my back was pressed against. Nothing there either.
Privateers Page 26