Terry and Kay fell into a rhythm that week, their happiest in years. During the days he worked, leaving the house while she was still in bed. Kay read through the morning or did yoga, following videos on her laptop. She sunbathed a little. Then she walked down the white chalk airport road, past Mission HQ, and all the way up the big hill to the Bon Temps, where she had lunch. It was a very strange feeling for Kay to be the only white woman on the streets. As a teenager, she had been friends with one of the few black kids at her school, a pretty girl named Nina. Nina had told Kay that it was exhausting just being different all day, even if most people were nice. Now Kay thought about looking Nina up on Facebook and letting her know that two decades later, she finally understood. In the afternoon she took a motorcycle taxi back to the house: she hadn’t been on a motorcycle in decades, and these rides, weaving around donkeys and bumping over rocks and potholes, felt as forbidden and thrilling as when she was a teenager riding home on her high school boyfriend’s Yamaha. When Terry came home, he would take her swimming, and they would make dinner together, cobbling together whatever ingredients she found in the market.
Later, Terry and Kay would have a nightcap on the roof of the house. The evening breeze carried hints of honeysuckle, jasmine, lilacs, and passionflower. Bats flashed from tree to to tree, and vast hordes of slow-waltzing constellations danced across the night sky. Later the moon shone so brightly she could see her own sharp-edged shadow. She was happy.
The night before Kay was scheduled to go back to Florida, she and Terry fought. She had planned a romantic evening for her last night in Jérémie, but as soon as she saw him coming home from work, his face drawn tight with anger and irritation, she knew that he was in a lousy mood. He banged around the kitchen, ignoring the pretty dress she had put on for him, muttering to himself until she finally asked him just what was his problem. Terry told her that Marguerite Laurent had passed him over for another decent job, this time as reports officer, a desk job that would have taken him off the patrol roster and given him some time to rest his aching back. When he’d complained, Marguerite Laurent said, “If you’re not physically fit for duty, you should consider your future in the Mission.”
“What you got to understand is that this woman is a world-class ballbreaker,” Terry told Kay. “She’s had it in for me since the day I showed up.”
“What do you think her deal is?” Kay asked, still hoping to jolly him into an acceptable mood.
“Who knows?” Terry said. “She’s Queen Marguerite, and if you don’t lick the royal boot, you get patrol.”
“Are you the only one who has problems with her, or does everyone else get along with her?”
“What are you trying to say, Kay?”
Kay lost her patience. “I’m just saying that I’ve seen this play before. The set was all different, and they changed the lady playing the bitch, but otherwise, same actor, same text.”
Kay and Terry looked at each other. The thing about being married all these years was that they could have the fight from start to finish, soup to nuts, Alpha to Zulu, without saying one more word. The minute that followed might have seemed to an outsider like nothing more than an attractive couple on the threshold of middle age sitting quietly, but to Kay and Terry, the air was thick with attack, counterattack, defensive parries, sly, stinging remarks, and wounded feelings. There was no need to say another word because they’d said all the relevant ones so many times before. Kay knew that Terry was thinking that he was in Haiti because of her, because she’d driven the family finances off a cliff with her ice sculptures and soft sheets and investment-grade apartments; and Terry knew that Kay was blaming him because she’d given him the best years of her life and she’d come out of it with nothing more to show for it than a persistently bruised heart and debt. Soon the fight degenerated from grievances to assaults on each other’s character. Kay said out loud, “Should we open a bottle of wine?” But Terry heard Kay denounce him as his own worst enemy—it was funny, wasn’t it, just how many people seemed to have it in for Terry. Kay told Terry that he’d had opportunity after opportunity over the years and he’d gone out of his way to blow them. And you know why? Because you’re frightened, Terry. You’d rather destroy something before it gets going and blame Marguerite Laurent or Marianne Miller or Tony Guillermez than try and fail. You’re a coward.
Kay had meant to make Terry angry, and she had succeeded, but she winced when he told her that she was spoiled. She hated the word “spoiled,” with its suggestion of rot and age; and she thought to accuse anyone who had worked as hard as she had over the years of being spoiled was so unfair. The truth is, she told Terry, is that you think anyone in a good mood is spoiled. Maybe Marguerite Laurent should be considering your mental health issues, Terry, not your back problems. Anyone who isn’t miserable, in your book, is spoiled. Maybe if I was a quadriplegic begging on the streets of Calcutta I’d have the right to smile, but otherwise, I’m a spoiled brat. You can’t stand it that I’m not depressed.
Had Terry’s phone not rung, the two of them might have continued to fight all through the evening. Even as they prepared dinner, they would have fought: the two of them were entirely capable of discussing whether the pasta was ready, whether the wine was sufficiently chilled, and what time her flight left the next morning in tones an outsider might have considered perfectly amicable, even as another conversation was conducted between them, no words employed, that was cruel and biting and true. The fight might well have lasted until that moment when Kay set foot on her plane back to Port-au-Prince and Miami, the whole otherwise lovely visit clouded by a sense of disgruntlement and marital unease, despite the fact that neither Terry nor Kay had said out loud so much as a single bitter word.
But at that moment Terry’s phone rang. He had the phone chiefly to communicate with Kay herself. It might have been the first time since she arrived that she heard its shrill ringtone. She startled slightly.
“Talk to me, brother,” Terry said.
Then Terry was moving quickly, listening and standing up at the same time, holstering his pistol. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. “Get under the bed and stay away from the windows. Don’t go outside. I’m on my way.”
He slipped the phone into his pocket.
“Who’s that?” Kay asked.
“I’ve got to go.”
Kay could tell from the cast of his face that whatever was happening was serious. Something she knew about Terry, something she liked very much, was that he was extremely competent in an emergency. She trusted absolutely his judgment on important matters, matters of life and death: she knew in these moments not to interfere or question him. Then she could hear the siren of his patrol car screaming. She sat alone in the early-evening darkness, wondering what she would do if he never came home.
* * *
Terry first met Johel Célestin at Mission HQ when Johel came to give the UNPOLs a presentation on the situation in Les Irois. Presentations like the judge’s were a regular feature of UNPOL life, some speaker from Port-au-Prince or per diem king droning on monotonously for an hour or two about arrest warrants or the responsibilities of the local justice of the peace.
But Johel was a lively speaker. Terry admired a good orator, even if the oration was just a PowerPoint slideshow for a couple dozen UNPOLs. He appreciated that Johel switched between English and French, making sure that everyone in the room followed the complicated legal and political details. Moreover, Johel was passionate about his subject. Terry had been surprised how many people associated with the Mission, both Haitian and foreigner, seemed to speak from some dead-souled place of extreme boredom and cynicism. But Terry could see from the judge’s animated face and sharp eyes that the situation in Les Irois was keeping him up nights.
The dossier Johel discussed with the UNPOLs dealt with a recent spate of civil unrest in the small seaside town of Les Irois. The mayor of Les Irois, Maximilien “Fanfan” Dorsainville, had for many years enjoyed an intense and combative rivalr
y with another local politician, a fellow by the name of Hyppolite Aurélienne. Despite their differences, Mayor Fanfan and Député Aurélienne had maintained an uneasy truce, until sometime shortly after the most recent election, when Député Aurélienne achieved for his district a legislative coup, finagling a grant for the creation of a community radio station—the money a gift of the European people, part of a European Union democracy-building program. What Député Aurélienne did not mention to the Europeans was that the man who would own and run this radio station was none other than himself.
The station quickly won loyal listeners by offering a daily diet of Compas music and soccer scores, but the choicest offering came at dusk, when Député Aurélienne, a little man in possession of an incongruously deep voice, sat in the recording booth, opened a bottle of rum, and discussed the faults of his archenemy, the Honorable Mayor Fanfan. This was a subject that could keep him going for hours. He informed his listeners of Mayor Fanfan’s corrupt and extravagant ways, his taste for young girls. All this naturally rankled Hizzoner, but what threw the mayor over the top was when the député mocked Mayor Fanfan’s considerable girth: Mayor Fanfan had a habit of traveling around town by two-stroke motorcycle, and the député commiserated with the burdens of that poor vehicle, calling it the “Mayor’s Camel” on account of the way the motorbike bobbed lazily up and down on the road as it hauled Mayor Fanfan over the rocks and dirt.
That was really going too far, and one day, with Député Aurélienne in Port-au-Prince attending to the people’s business, armed men broke down the door of the small radio station and, live and on the air, shot all four citizens found inside: the député’s brother-in-law, his nephew, a radio engineer from the capital who had come to adjust the antenna, and a young lady whose reasons for being inside the station were never made clear. The radio engineer from Port-au-Prince lost his leg, and the young lady lost her eye; the others died. The station at that moment changed both management and political orientation.
The investigation into the shooting was assigned to Johel Célestin.
There is no precise equivalent to the juge d’instruction in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice. In the Haitian system of justice, a distant descendant of the Napoleonic Code, the juge d’instruction acts as a kind of investigative magistrate, a cross between a detective, a prosecutor, and a judge. The juge d’instruction has the power to investigate all manner of serious crimes and to imprison suspects for months at a time while the investigation proceeds. His job is to prepare a dossier that will eventually be submitted to a public prosecutor, who will then, based on the juge d’instruction’s research, take the case to trial.
Johel pursued his investigation of the shootings in Les Irois with his customary discipline and hard work. He interviewed dozens of witnesses and took hours of depositions. Soon he had produced a preliminary dossier setting out his findings, a dossier whose conclusion went far beyond the details of the night in question.
Johel explained the facts of the dossier to Terry and the other UNPOLs. Haiti lies roughly midway between Colombia and the southeastern coast of the United States; to transport cocaine from Colombia directly to the United States is both risky and difficult. Far better to ship cocaine to southern Haiti, transport the drug overland to the northern shore, and send the freight on to the Cold Land in many smaller pieces: in cigarette boats and catamarans and slow tankers out of Port-de-Paix in the north; buried in the purses, bellies, and trick-bottom suitcases of nervous-looking Haitian or Dominican immigrants; or across the border, where more efficient Dominican dispatchers would dispatch it north in cruise ships, diplomatic pouches, and cargo holds.
On moonless nights, no place in Haiti was darker than Les Irois, where the nearest electric light was at least fifty miles away. Fishing boats would slip out onto the Caribbean, returning at dawn with bricks of cocaine wedged under their nets. The war in Les Irois then was a battle over who would harvest this lucrative catch.
Judge Célestin’s dossier proposed that the man who organized the cocaine trade in Les Irois was not the mayor, but rather his patron, Sénateur Maxim Bayard.
* * *
At first the judge had thought the shots were fireworks, like the kinds the kids set off at Carnival. Then the kitchen window exploded, and Nadia shrieked. Nadia’s cry made the judge realize that something was wrong, but still he had trouble understanding that somebody meant to do him harm. Nobody had ever wanted to harm him before. There were two different sounds: one was the sound of the shot and the other was a kind of echoing thwack as the bullet lodged in the hard cement of the house. The judge saw himself in the mirror: he was smiling, as if this all were some complicated practical joke. Nadia had already left the kitchen and was running down the corridor to the bedroom. The judge saw his own face settle into a scowl, and he followed her, patting his pocket for his phone.
* * *
Judge Célestin told the UNPOLs that there was nothing he could do to prosecute the Sénateur, who, like all members of the Haitian legislature, enjoyed the privilege of parliamentary immunity. The phrase “parliamentary immunity” rankled Terry: no one should be above the law. Still, the judge’s dossier had potentially broad ramifications. You can’t ignore a thing like that, not even in Haiti. In the worst case, it might cause the American embassy to invoke the Oxblood rule, which limited the dispersal of American money to foreign governments known to be involved in the trafficking of narcotics. The U.S. secretary of state was required to certify to Congress that this was not the case—how could she do that with a report like the judge’s on record? No one wanted to see that happen here. This was the kind of case that causes the embassy to start suspending visas.
The judge told the UNPOLs that he was looking to arrest the mayor, who still remained at large, and convince him to testify under oath against the Sénateur. Such testimony, the judge felt, might compel the sénat to lift its esteemed member’s immunity and allow him to be prosecuted.
Terry knew that the judge had long ago issued a mandat for the arrest of the mayor, but he also knew that no one had succeeding in getting Fanfan in the bracelets. The local PNH had been ordered to arrest him but, themselves frightened of the mayor and his henchmen, failed to produce him. Twice pickup trucks of armed PNH had been sent from Jérémie to arrest the mayor, but both times he had been tipped off to the operation and slipped into the hills, coming back down when the coast was clear. Rumor held that Sénateur Maxim Bayard was the mayor’s informant.
At the conclusion of Johel’s presentation, Terry invited the judge for a beer. His own run-in with the Sénateur in the parking lot of the Bon Temps had made him sympathetic to Johel’s work, and he was curious about this earnest young Haitian judge. More than once in the course of his investigation, Johel told Terry, he had received telephone calls in the middle of the night, only to hear the sounds of a funeral Mass played on the other end of the line. Then there had been an incident just a week before, when Johel came home to find the cadaver of a dog on his front steps. The judge’s courage moved Terry and made him feel a little ashamed: here was somebody doing what Terry came to Haiti to do. He gave the judge his card and told him to call, day or night, if there was anything he could do to help.
* * *
There were varying accounts of just what happened the night that Johel called Terry, and far and away the most modest was the account offered by Terry himself. The judge’s house was up in Calasse, where Johel, a few years back, had bought a plot of land. Terry drove up in the darkness, high beams shining and siren wailing, and the way he told it, the sound of the siren alone was sufficient to drive off the two men on a motorcycle who had been firing their pistols at the judge’s concrete house. By the time Terry arrived, he said, all he could see was the bouncing crimson of their receding taillight.
When Kay heard this story, she thought it sounded heroic in and of itself. But the judge, when she finally met him a few months later, told her that there was not one motorcycle, but two, four armed men in total.
And they weren’t firing pistols, he said, but assault rifles. When Terry’s headlights hit them, they turned from firing at the judge’s house to firing in the direction of his oncoming vehicle—and still he kept coming. Only the fact that they were lousy shots prevented them from shooting Terry or his vehicle. Then they fled on their bikes.
Whatever the precise details, it was a fact that when Terry finally came back from the judge’s house late that night, he was shaking with adrenaline. Kay poured him a healthy glass of rum and took one for herself. Then she gave him a long massage, concentrating first on his shoulders and aching back, then kissing all the places where the muscles were knotted and hard. “My hero,” she said. Other women might have been frightened by Terry’s story, but Kay was exhilarated. That night he made love to her with a ferocious intensity, as if the two of them were breaking rules.
The two stayed up most of the night talking. They talked about Haiti, about all the strange twists of fate and odd coincidences, the setbacks and victories that had brought them to this place at this moment: they were in a town neither of them, six months before, had ever heard of, in a country they had barely known existed.
“Maybe you were here just to answer that phone call tonight,” Kay said.
“Maybe,” Terry said. “But can I tell you something? And you won’t laugh or—”
Kay replied by kissing Terry. He could feel the softness of her breasts on his chest.
Peacekeeping Page 13