“Anne.” My voice echoes.
“Aye.”
“More rope. Ten feet this time.”
The rope slackens a third time. I crab down until the rope stops me at twenty-two feet deep. It feels like a thousand. What air there is smells like a mausoleum we’re inside to repair. I shine to inspect the wall above my right shoe and repeat Eddie O’Hare’s first stanza. The one he copied from Poe that I can’t figure. My voice sounds dead:
Go over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,
The shade replied—
If you seek for El Dorado.
Maybe I wasn’t grabbing straws back at the cathedral; maybe the well is our “Valley of the Shadow.”
I shine the light a foot below my right shoe at twenty-three feet.
Nope. Next wall, under my left shoe. Nope. Wait—one of the stones has a mark. A cross? I lean with the light as close as I can. The mark is a cross, but the oval isn’t there. Trap?
I brace around the shaft while shining the light at twenty-three feet. No other marks. No trip wires.
Okay. In theory, I am supposed to be in the well. I am supposed to trust the vintner—the well-builder. I am supposed to be looking for the ‘hare contraire’—the turtle, a rabbit, Mackandal’s mark. What I’m not supposed to do is trust the ‘shade’ or the ‘fille de joie.’ And it’s the shade who is telling me to go down the “Valley of the Shadow” . . . to take the Psalm 23 trip.
Twenty-three. Hmm.
I shine the light on the ballast brick placed at precisely twenty-three feet. I know it’s twenty-three feet because I counted the ballast bricks on my way down. Let’s say the brick is the trap. What would the trap be? This isn’t a King Tut movie with a Hollywood budget. Did Eddie O’Hare’s guy plant a spear on a truck spring? A WWI grenade? That’s possible—would’ve been a bunch of US ordnance here when Eddie O’Hare was. A grenade in the face would be messy.
Okay. We won’t trust the shade and his “twenty-three.” I shine all four walls ten feet above me. Nothing. Then the cross again. I pull the Ka-Bar and lean toward the brick. The cross is upside down. None of the other crosses in Eddie’s drawings were upside down. Swallow. I bend back and sheath the knife.
“Gimme six feet.”
The rope slackens. I shimmy down to twenty-eight feet. The air is almost too thin to breathe, but not too thin to see a ballast brick with the turtle/Mackandal mark at twenty-eight feet. I yell “Found it!” and pull the knife to dig it out. And stop.
Are we sure? Grenade in the face?
I stare at the mark. Twenty-three feet had big meaning; does twenty-eight?
I replay Eddie O’Hare’s poem, don’t see a ‘twenty-eight,’ hold my breath, and chisel out the ballast brick.
It doesn’t explode. Exhale. Something’s in the hole—
The light quits above me. Anne yells down the well, “Cut your light.”
I do. The three-by-three shaft goes black. I freeze. All of me tries to hear. Sweat dribbles my face. Someone is on the island. Anne saw or felt someone. My legs ache. Slowly, I trust the rope seat with all my weight. It holds . . . then jolts.
I jam my feet and back into the bricks just before the seat goes slack. The rope above me falls straight down and smashes me in the head and legs. Mackandal’s ballast brick slips out of my hand, falls into the silent dark. A splash echoes. I stare straight up for the light beam that will ID me. Listen for the voices. My only escape is a fall to the bottom. Dry swallow. Heart rate in my neck. Down there below me, in the three-by-three walls, my night terrors wait.
Chapter 24
Bill Owens
No light beam. No voices. Can’t see my hands. Or my feet. I untangle from the weight of the rope. It falls . . . then splashes.
Dry swallow.
I reach into Mackandal’s hole. A bottle? Grab the neck and pull. Can’t see it, but can slide it into my ripped shirt. Using my feet and back I wriggle higher against the walls, climb three feet of the twenty-eight, and stop. Whatever spooked Anne was bad or she wouldn’t have dumped the rope.
AK flashes and full-auto gunfire erupt above the well.
Then stops. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand—
The AKs roar again.
No flashes. Not as loud. I wedge up the wall, pressing and pushing, keeping constant pressure with my legs and back. My leg muscles ache.
Shouts. Men’s voices.
I freeze, wait for their light to shine down twenty feet. Drowning will be better. I death-grip the knife; try to see faces but can’t. No flashlight beams shine down the well. The voices fade. Push, press; my thigh muscles burn, want to cramp. Ten feet. Don’t fucking cramp. Don’t slip. Don’t slide. Five feet to the top. You can do this—
Voices—Not voices, one voice, and it’s singing, demented, high and shrill. But not immediately above the well.
My right thigh cramps.
I pound at the cramp; bite down on the scream, pound the cramp, wedge higher, then higher, make the well’s lip, hear nothing, and crawl over onto the sand.
Both hands claw into the leg cramp.
No one attacks. I bite my scream silent. Blood drips down my chin.
Somewhere in the trees, the voice screeches singsong Tontons Macoutes, then slips into a work-song cadence. A light flickers fifty feet down the path, brightens into a glow.
I regrip the Ka-Bar, suck air; wipe my eyes; search dark and shadows for Anne or Siri; listen for more rapists crawling through the trees. My heart pounds. And keeps pounding for five minutes. One voice, the Tonton, is all I hear. Alone? Or the only rapist making noise? A guard left behind? A lookout? One of the Gryphon’s pirate Tontons . . . has to be. Must’ve come in from the prison we passed at the channel’s mouth. If the pirate’s alone, the others didn’t leave him here to die. Maybe he has a boat. For sure he’ll have a gun. I pat sand for my AK. It’s not where I leaned it. The work song stops.
My free hand pats more sand and dark for the AK. No brass casings in the sand—the flashes and gunfire weren’t up here, that’s why the Gryphon’s pirates didn’t look in the well. The night-howler screeching starts again. Siri wouldn’t die easily. Anne would fight hand-to-hand to the death. If either woman were alive, the screeching piece of shit below wouldn’t be.
Pat, pat—no AK.
I do have the knife, and surprise. And this rapist, night-howler Tonton Macoute pirate piece of shit doesn’t know I’m here. I stand, knee-lift each leg to make sure they work, then crouch through the mangroves onto the path. Wind gusts cover my approach.
In the clearing with the sulfur stench, a Tonton faces a small fire that he’s sheltered from the wind. Three pirate bodies are sprawled where they must’ve died in the fight with Anne and Siri. The rhum bottle in the Tonton’s left hand is three-quarters full. His multiple shirts are an odd mix of color and shape, and he wears an Ida rebel cap backward. I make him five eight, 140, shorter and lighter than me. His face is painted ash white. A boning knife extends from his right hand. No pants; he’s naked from the waist down.
He turns toward my tree cover like he hears something. As he turns, a shape silhouettes behind him in the flickering shadows. Lifeless. Naked. A woman posed, submissive, sexual. The breath catches in my throat. Anne Bonny or Florent Dusson-Siri. His boning knife glints. A red flash streaks from the trees. The Tonton turns; Anne Bonny buries a knife in his stomach. He screams; she pancakes with him to the sand, shoulder-rolls off his chest to her feet, then on top of him again before he can move, twisting her knife and stripping his.
From the trees, I shout, “Anne!”
She spins on her haunches, knives in both hands, and realizes it’s me before she lunges. The fire glows her. She’s soaking wet, a wound across her cheek and forehead.
I step out of the tr
ees, knife at my side. “You okay?”
Anne jumps to the Tonton’s AK, checks the magazine full, half-racks the bolt, curls her finger on the trigger, and waves me to her side of the fire.
She says, “Miscreants thought they’d have their way before they delivered me; thought me too beaten to kill them at sea.” She stoops, checks Siri’s dead from three gunshots to the chest, cups Siri’s head with both hands, kisses her once, and whispers, “A beauty you are, Florent, and it’s a first day in heaven you’re having.” Anne flattens Siri’s legs, covers what she can, and points me up the path toward the well. “Did ya find it?”
“Bottle’s in my shirt.”
“A good man ya are, William. We’ve the Esmeralda and our arms. We’ll bring our dying pirate to the beach, then Siri to the boat, drop her in the bay so these maggots can’t have her. The Gryphon’s small boats will be comin’ back straightaway.”
“Why? Let the fucking rapist die here.”
“Move, Bill; we need him where we’re going.”
I use the Tonton’s belt to pull him up. He screams and struggles. Anne jumps into the Tonton’s painted face, her knife point buried under his chin.
“The Gryphon has my friend.” Anne’s eyes are green murder. “You and I, Tonton, will be gettin’ her back.”
***
We’ve buried Siri in the bay’s waves. The Tonton who raped her in death is faceup on the bloody deck of the Esmeralda, hands tied behind him. If the wound Anne punched in his side is left untreated, it will likely kill him in a day, maybe less, and every one of those hours will be excruciating as his insides go septic.
Anne sails us without lights. We’re pointed away from the storm and away from the break in the mangroves where the Tonton says we will find the Gryphon’s hidden bayou channel. She slows, then turns the Esmeralda’s bow back into the waves blowing in, and says, “We’ll need the gold to trade for Susie. Do we have it?”
“Don’t know.” I pull the Barbancourt bottle from the transom locker where I secured it. The bottle rattles. I open the seal. No vial; a key, an odd one. Nothing else. I shine the flashlight in the bottle—empty. Just the key. The head of the key isn’t flat, it’s a translucent amber glass bowl. I look up, blinking. The Tonton is staring at me.
Anne says, “Keep the light below the gunwale.” She opens the first aid kit to put her face back together.
I kneel on the deck, look at the key. Bits of debris blow past my head.
An amber bowl?
Why a bowl key?
“Meaning a bowl is the key? The gold is in a bowl?” Have to be a ginormous bowl for 1,650 pounds—
A canyon? No, too big. A pool, like a swimming pool?
Yeah, could be that. Probably not many pools in Haiti in the 1930s. Did Eddie O’Hare pick one of the few, hide the gold, then fill it in? And figure no one would notice?
Would have to be an estate he owned or controlled . . . that no one in the last eighty years has decided needs a pool—
A bay wave bucks the boat; the Tonton groans. Anne says, “Florent Dusson-Siri,” and kicks him in the jaw.
I say, “Sorry about Siri.”
Anne nods, patching her face.
My left hand hefts the empty bottle of Barbancourt.
No vial, just a key. And a face-painted Tonton Macoute from my night terrors. Quit looking at him. Naked from the waist down. Not part of the clue. Concentrate on the clue—the clue, Boss, the clue. Fantasy-fucking-Island.
Eddie O’Hare’s key plays in my fingers.
Okay, what about the key itself? Where would Eddie get a key with a translucent amber bowl on the end of it? A nice one at that. Sort of primitive, but almost jewelry?
Lots of artists in Haiti.
US-type key? Could be, but so what?
Would fit a US lock.
And . . . I fumble the key again. The key and the lock it fits are probably too general to be a clue written in the 1930s.
Meaning the clue is the translucent amber bowl? Exhale. Face rub.
Anne looks down her shoulder. “Can you figure it?”
“Not yet.”
“What about the bottle? Anything on the label?”
I roll the Barbancourt bottle and look at the label, the image of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Bonaparte, and her husband, General Charles Leclerc. I say what I know out loud: “I was Barbancourt’s main competitor when I was with Myers’s. Big story, Barbancourt. Great rhum. Cool family, two families actually—three if you count the niece, Jane. She started her own brand and a family war.”
Anne grabs at straws. “Does a key ‘fit’ that? Family or a family war?”
Hmm. “Don’t see it. Maybe just family? Like key to the family?”
Anne says, “O’Hare’s taken with Barbancourt; used it in every clue. Is it the rhum itself?”
Blink. Could be. Every clue since Astor Argyle has been in a Barbancourt bottle.
Gotta mean something, doesn’t it? I shine the light tighter on the label, thinking out loud: “These bottles would’ve been hard to come by during Prohibition. Hell, any time. The Reserve du Domaine—even back when I was here—was just for family and friends, never enough to sell.”
I re-look the label, read each line for a bowl or key reference.
“This is the best Barbancourt made. I drank with the owners a couple of times in Castle Barbancourt and never saw this vintage . . . and Eddie’s O’Hare’s got at least five of ’em?”
Squint. Headache. Saltwater wind. The Tonton rapist motherfucker is staring at me.
“What, motherfucker? You want me to shoot you? That what you said?”
“Bill. Get hold of yourself. Concentrate.”
I sit back on my heels, allow the water, dark, and wind to slap me with survival.
Anne says, “So the clue is family? Or the rhum? What’s grand about the Barbancourts that matters to us? To O’Hare?”
Maybe Anne’s right. To have all these bottles, O’Hare must’ve been a friend of the family in the 1920s or ’30s, principally the Gardère family, a Haiti and rhum dynasty that could rival the Ewings of TV’s Dallas. I squeeze my eyes shut to recall what I can.
“Madame Gardère-Barbancourt was the founder’s wife. They had no children. Her husband, Dupré Barbancourt, died first, and she passed the company on to her nephew Paul Gardère, whose sons probably still own it.
“In my day, the distillery was near Damien, moved up there after World War Two from Port-au-Prince. Jean Gardère ran it. I drank with him in the Oloffson’s bar. Saw a nasty argument between him and the niece, Jane Barbancourt-Linge.”
Anne says, “So? O’Hare knew them? How? Where?”
I reinspect the vintage, the label—Reserve du Domaine.
Domaine, like ‘house’?
Reserve of the house. Is this Poe again? The Fall of the House of Usher?
“The family battle started when Jane built her own distillery right after World War Two, the same time that Jean Gardère moved the original Barbancourt distillery out of Port-au-Prince to Damien. Jean built a basic farm/factory out there, but no great house.
“But Jane, Jane built a castle. Used the foundation of an old fuel depot or pipeline. An addition actually to the original castle . . . that would’ve been there when Eddie O’Hare was around.” Blink, wonder. “And Jane threw lavish parties. I was a guest at two of them in the ’80s, toured Castle Barbancourt four or five times, the cellar, the tasting room, the balcony . . . old casks for chairs, chandeliers made from bottles. She had bottles everywhere—in the walls, even the floors.”
Anne says, “Bottles like O’Hare’s bottles?”
I nod. “Uh-huh . . . same color too.” I look at the key. “Same amber color as the glass bowl on the end of this key.”
Anne restarts at the beginning, quotes me: “Meaning a bowl is the key? Our gold
’s in a bowl? Where’s Castle Barbancourt?”
“On a mountain, southwest of Pétion-Ville, in La Boule—”
Anne shouts: “La Boules is French for a game: ‘the bowls.’”
“Eddie’s a game guy . . . That’s it!” If I weren’t sitting, I’d fall down. “This key will open a vault somewhere in Castle Barbancourt. The vault will have twenty-six thousand ounces of gold. Holy shit. I should’ve been a treasure hunter.”
Anne frowns. “Pétion-Ville is one hundred miles south, over mountains, through a three-way civil war we won’t survive, then mangrove swamps we won’t survive. Then we do it again, backward, to trade for Susie.”
“I just hit the pick-six for us. Can I enjoy that for a minute?”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure?” Horseplayer-happy melts to reality. “I’m in Haiti, surrounded by a revolution, facing an inbound hurricane. No, I’m not sure.”
“Then the only way is to get Susie first.”
“But you said—”
“We convince the Gryphon we know where the gold is. Use his plane—that we know he has for his cocaine and red-market business—he flies Susie and us above the Rebelyon, away from the hurricane, and to Castle Barbancourt.”
“But you said there’s no way to face him without the gold—”
“Susie Devereux’s my friend.” Anne pats her bandage to her face. “We sail together; we finish together.”
“And that magically changes—”
“If ya’d rather not, then you’re on your own and the best luck to ya.”
I look at my options in the water, dark, and wind.
Anne says, “We’ve been to the brink before, William, and made it back.”
Pause.
Anne’s right. And the “before” was me who’d needed the saving, on the Oloffson’s road, then in the boat, and finally from Carel’s gun. I’d laugh if I could. For three years, I drank the demons back into the dark. I stare at Anne; no way they’re taking her alive, she just proved that. And I owe Susie for Chicago or it’d be me in the mangroves.
I glance the Tonton. “If these cannibals grab us, you kill me. That’s the deal.”
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