“I got here—and you know, I wasn’t good here. But ever since I got here, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m meant to be here. That this is it.”
They were silent for a moment. Somebody observing them might have seen nothing but a couple lying quietly and supposed that they were drifting off to sleep. But Terry was telling Kay, no words necessary, that something important had been missing and he thought he had found it. It was something even more important than happiness: it was something you would give your happiness to obtain. And Kay was telling Terry that this time, finally, they weren’t going to waste their opportunity, that she would be with him every step of the way, wherever this new road might lead.
Finally Kay said, speaking out loud, “Have you felt that way before?”
“Only once,” he said. “When I met you.”
Kay didn’t know if Terry was telling the truth, but even if he wasn’t, she liked that he loved her enough to lie.
* * *
The morning after the attack, Johel Célestin came to Mission HQ, where he asked Marguerite Laurent, the head of the UNPOL program, what the Mission could do to protect him. The judge made it clear that should the Mission be unable to guarantee his security, his inquiries regarding Les Irois would end.
The situation in Les Irois was now a matter of national interest. The radio engineer from Port-au-Prince who lost a leg had filed a complaint with Amnesty International, and soon thereafter Le Nouvelliste, the newspaper in Port-au-Prince, ran an article on the rogue mayor of Les Irois. At Port-au-Prince cocktail parties foreign donors mentioned the case to their Haitian counterparts; terms like “judicial impunity” were bandied about in high circles. The American ambassador mentioned the situation in Les Irois to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in their weekly meeting; the SRSG considered the situation an embarrassment and a hindrance to his own personal project of one day becoming a Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, and he directed his subordinates to take all necessary measures to bring the situation to an expeditious conclusion.
For all of these reasons, Marguerite Laurent knew that it was important to assist the judge in any way she could. Because the Mission had no executive power in Haiti, and because the Mission’s mandate extended only to monitoring and mentoring, she could not directly assign UNPOLs as bodyguards, but she soon spoke with the directeur départemental of the PNH, who reluctantly agreed to create a four-man VIP protection unit, with the Mission offering monitoring, mentoring, and support. Then she agreed to Johel’s other request, and she assigned Terry to lead the squad.
4
The organizational chart of a large bureaucratic entity is like some baroque habitation, a Sicilian palazzo, say, in which might exist for decades forgotten and unexamined rooms, suites of rooms, and even wings, a film of dust coating equally the ormolu dresser, a bloodstain on the marble floor, and the skeleton of a cat. Once a box exists on an org chart—in this case the box read “Close Personal Protection”—the box will exist forever: no one will question the box’s right to exist. With Terry White now assigned to the box, it was understood by all that it was his to occupy indefinitely. No one thought to question him overmuch on his activities, provided that he supply a weekly précis to be included in the situation report. As long as no one complained—and for a very long time no one did—he was allowed to continue occupying the box.
So Johel and Terry got to spending a lot of time together. Terry was officially charged with monitoring, mentoring, and supporting a four-man crew of PNH in the art of close personal protection. The first few weeks on the job went like this: the judge traveled everywhere with two PNH and Terry; two other PNH guarded the judge’s house during the night. Terry instructed these men as best he could, bearing in mind that he himself had almost no experience in the bodyguard’s art other than what he found on the Internet. He encouraged in the PNH alertness, attentiveness to threats, and an imposing manner. Because he considered the judge’s life at risk, Terry committed himself to remaining in his presence as many hours of the day as he could. Here was a job—because he liked the judge, because it was useful, and because he was bored—that he was determined to do well.
Terry’s commitment to the judge’s welfare, however, was not matched by an equivalent zeal on the part of his trainees. The directeur départemental of the PNH was an ally of the Sénateur’s and had agreed to create this squad of bodyguards only reluctantly. As the drama of the attempted assassination faded, one by one the directeur départemental reassigned the trainees to other duties. In a matter of weeks, Terry found himself traveling the Grand’Anse with the judge alone. No one noticed that Terry was now in charge of the monitoring, mentoring, and support of a squad that no longer existed, except on paper.
Terry and the judge soon were friends. The men shared the kind of easy chemistry that allows a couple of fellows to spend upward of eight hours a day in a car together, navigating the back roads of the Grand’Anse.
The judge, for his part, didn’t want to be out of Terry’s sight. There had been a minute or seven when the bullets were coming through the house when he knew that he was going to die. Death came into the bedroom as a great white shadow, and Johel felt the ti bon ange, his good little angel, separate from his grosser body, filleted out of matter as neatly as a butcher takes fat off meat. Then his big body heard the siren of Terry’s car, and tentatively, like a frightened cat, the ti bon ange returned home. But Johel’s soul was skittish. As the days passed, that feeling of fragile equipoise between this home and the next stayed just as strong as the minute the first bullet broke the window and the adrenaline started coursing in his veins. It made him edgy and nervous and a little nauseated, and he stopped sleeping at night. It wasn’t the rational part of his brain, but something reptilian and concerned with survival that felt better if Terry was within eyesight. So at the end of the day he made a point of inviting Terry in for drinks, and on weekends invented excuses to get him over.
As it happened, Johel’s house had been shot up just days before the World Series was scheduled to commence. Both men loved watching sports, and so they decided to go fifty-fifty on a new satellite dish to replace the old one, which the bullets had reduced to little more than an oversize colander. In this way, long days on the road visiting remote Haitian villages soon metastasized into lazy evenings at Johel’s concrete house, the generator cranked outside to keep the beer cold and the TV rolling.
When Terry told Kay about the judge, she said, “He’s got a little man-crush on you.”
Terry said, “You think?”
But Terry soon came to admire Johel too, not only for the Ivy League diplomas on the wall, but for the gentle, respectful way he spoke with everyone he met. When Terry took the judge down to the Tribunal in the morning, outside the judge’s office there was always a line of Haitian peasants, two dozen long. Terry sat sometimes and talked to the peasants, and what was most notable was the stories he didn’t hear: I was slapped in jail by the judge, kept there two weeks until my lady visited him. Price of freedom was a night with my woman and a thousand dollars. Nobody told Terry that the judge was shaking him down, wanting a stack of bills just to give Nobody a court case that would end up with Nobody humiliated and embarrassed by a pair of fancy French-speaking avocats from town, everyone laughing at Nobody, until finally the judge, upon due and proper consideration, decided that Monsieur Nobody here owed everyone his balls. That wasn’t how it was with Juge Blan. The peasants told Terry that this judge was decent. He listened. He was smart. In his courtroom or office, it was just you and the neg you’re arguing with—he planted crops on my land; he ate my goat, which wandered onto his property—the judge asking questions, rubbing his big fat chin, then saying, “This is the law.”
Terry didn’t know how to say it precisely, but he had been looking for someone like the judge for a long time.
Soon the two men were talking work. Terry had a lot of hours to watch the judge on the job, and he had advice to offe
r him. The judge was a fine jurist, but his training was in corporate law. The role of juge d’instruction, however, required the skills of both lawyer and lawman. The juge d’instruction was a judge, but also a detective and interrogator, someone capable of forming a dossier sufficiently complete to submit to a prosecutor. This was very similar to the work Terry had done for decades. So Terry offered the judge advice on how to pursue his investigative responsibilities: how to interrogate a suspect, how to coax a confession, and how to use that confession to convince others to confess.
The judge, for his part, offered Terry an education on the realities of rural Haiti. This place wasn’t just poor like it’s just hot, he told Terry. It was made poor. There were forces and people that made these people poor, and it wasn’t just an accident. Terry was a history buff: on his bedside table there was generally a presidential biography or a volume of popular military history. So the judge’s impromptu lectures fell on congenial ears. The judge explained to Terry that Haiti had been founded as a revolution of slaves, but the revolution hadn’t ever really ended, even now, two hundred years after the last slave owner’s throat was slit. The country was divided to this day between a very small, very wealthy pale-skinned French-speaking population—the descendants of slave owners or their mulatto offspring—and the vast population of descendants of slaves, most of them living in the country, most of them poor, Creole-speaking, and black. Power in the country tended to flip back and forth between one group and the other, politicians using national office chiefly as a means to enrich themselves and devastate their enemies.
“You mean people like Maxim Bayard?” asked Terry.
* * *
Working with trainees back home, Terry had always said, “Give ’em a KISS: Keep It Simple for the Stupid.” It was a point of pride over the years, the paucity of broken doors in his territory. As deputy sheriff, he had for years tracked down deadbeat dads just by mailing to their last known address a postcard informing them that they had won a new set of tires from a local dealership. Gentlemen presented themselves as regular as sunshine, no muss and no fuss, no overestimating the folly of Watsonville County’s criminal class. Some guys showed up twice for those tires. Then there had been the time some mastermind was hoisting power tools from garages and Terry had put an ad in the local paper, offering to buy power tools. He could tell such stories from tomorrow until the resurrection. Terry’s fundamental insight now was that they needed Mayor Fanfan to come to them.
Soon there came a day when the judge and Terry were in the judge’s office, the diplomas hanging on the wall, talking over the scandal du jour, the story of the député from Jérémie. Story starts with the European Union purchasing for the Haitian Parliament a fleet of brand new SUVs, on the reasonable grounds that parliamentarians needed some way to travel from their district to the capital. Along with the outright gift of the vehicles had been allocated a budget for maintenance of the fleet. Johel tells Terry that the député’s tires were rolling out new every week from the parliamentary garage and coming home shredded.
“And that would be on account of…”
“… Monsieur le Député taking the tires off his car and selling them,” said Johel.
“Naturally.”
“So the député has those bad boys on and off who knows how many times, when another député from up north confronts him on the floor of the Chambre des Députés. He’s waving receipts at him like they’re winning lottery tickets.”
The judge tells Terry that the député from Jérémie responded as any man whose dignity has been outraged should: he took his pistol out from under his suit coat and took a shot at his accuser, right there on the spot. He was standing, the judge indicated, about two meters away. Nevertheless, he missed, plugging a clerk of the chambre in the shoulder.
An investigation conducted by the leading members of the chambre ensued. These men were of the same political party as the député. They concluded that the shooting was accidental.
“What kind of country are you people running here, brother?” Terry asked.
The judge put on a four-hundred-dollar-per-hour face. “I’m quite sure that the député had no intention of shooting the legislative clerk in the shoulder.”
The conversation might have continued on considerably longer had Mayor Fanfan not telephoned. “Reach out to the man, you never know,” Terry had said. “Make him think you want to be his friend.” So the judge had sent Mayor Fanfan a Facebook friend request. Soon the judge and the mayor were talking most every day, trading text messages, laughing at each other’s bons mots, the judge clicking “Like” in response to Mayor Fanfan’s daily prayer.
And what you have to appreciate is that Haiti is a nation tête en bas, all upside down. What would have been strange in Haiti—not unheard-of, just a little off—would have been if a man in the judge’s position was not interested in doing a little commerce with a man like Mayor Fanfan. Terry understood that Haiti, end of the day, is all one big family: any two Haitians can talk things over, come to an arrangement. What’s that they say? All veins are made for blood. Friend and enemy were labile categories in Haiti. Friend & Enemy, Good & Evil, Alive & Dead: all like the thick, tangled vines that make up the mapou tree, can’t take one without the other. One day the judge wants to arrest you, says nasty things about you; the next day, he’s your friend. That’s no craziness. What wouldn’t have made sense is the judge just sitting there in Jérémie, brooding over that dossier like a fat hen.
So now, on the phone, the judge, suddenly inspired, was explaining to Mayor Fanfan what he had heard, that the blan were giving away motorcycles to rural elected officials, Honda 250cc off-road bikes, the kind with fat, knobby tires and a high wheelbase, just like they were giving vehicles to deputies and senators.
“That’s a beautiful machine,” the judge said, explaining that they had twenty of them just sitting on a lot behind the commissariat, waiting for the appropriate official to present himself with identification.
Mayor Fanfan makes a noise.
The judge said, “That’s what I’m saying. Maximilien Dorsainville, right there on the list, mayor of Les Irois.”
* * *
Soon there was an incident that made Terry appreciate with particular keenness the judge’s fine character. It consolidated the good impression the man had made on him. They were driving back from Dame Marie around dusk, just past Chambellan, where the mountains are high and lonely. An old man waved at them from the side of the road. Terry’s instinct was to keep going, but the judge said, “Stop a minute,” so Terry pulled over. A few minutes later Terry and the judge were in a smoky hut.
Terry could hardly see, it was so dark in there, and the occupants of the hut, perhaps a dozen men and women, were weeping and wailing so furiously that it took him a minute to realize that the little girl lying on a mattress in a dirty yellow dress was dead. She was no more than three years old. Terry looked at that girl and thought that no matter how a doctor might have diagnosed her death—malaria, typhoid, bad drinking water, or malnutrition—what she really died of was poverty, straight-out poverty. Her family didn’t have enough money to keep her alive, and she died. Terry had seen his share of death, but something in that hot little hut made him, ordinarily so cool in a crisis, want to vomit and run.
What settled him down was the sight of the judge, talking in his deep, calm voice with the family. He was respectful and grieving and solicitous. Terry couldn’t understand much of the language, but he figured out after a few minutes that the family couldn’t afford to bury their own little girl: not enough money for a coffin or a funeral or even to buy a little cement to build her a crypt in the backyard. Even her dress was old.
The judge told Terry to drive him down to Chambellan. The day was getting dark, and Terry didn’t like to be on the roads after sunset, but he didn’t say anything. In Chambellan, the judge asked a few questions, and before long he had ordered a carpenter to construct a coffin for the girl, paid for a funeral Mass, and bo
ught three yards of good white cotton. Then he had Terry drive back to the family, and he explained what he had done.
The patriarch of the family insisted on giving the judge a basket of mangoes and limes, straight from his own trees. It was mango season, and there was more fruit than the family could eat. It was falling on the ground and rotting.
On the way back, Terry said, “You ever think that if the Sénateur wasn’t the Sénateur, someone else could get that road built?”
* * *
So the judge is telling Terry about the time last year the mayor of Jérémie shot a protester in the back, when the phone rings.
It’s Mayor Fanfan, wanting to know what he should do about his motorcycle just sitting there.
“Just one left now, Fanfan,” says the judge, winking at Terry.
He tells Mayor Fanfan that the mayor of Bonbon and the mayor of Pestel came by to pick up their bikes. Just Fanfan and Beaumont still on the outside looking in, and you know Beaumont coming in for that bike.
Mayor Fanfan tells Johel, long time he’s been riding the Camel while Député Aurélienne cruised back and forth from the capital in that sweet Pathfinder. Long time he’s been feeling that particular insult and ache. Leader of the people of Les Irois, his commune extending outward and upward into the hills, some of his own people not even knowing his face on account of a lack of appropriate transportation. What tears him up double inside, he says, like he’s been drinking Clorox and eating rocks, is the thought that all his brother mayors—the mayor of Anse-d’Hainault, the mayor of Dame Marie, the mayor of Chambellan, the mayor of Moron—they all going to get their motorcycles while he’s left riding the Camel, on account of this Macoute injustice that makes it impolitic and unwise for him to travel in his own country. Two things matter to the mayor, that’s what he always tells his constituents: dignity and justice. That’s what he fights for every day while serving the people. And where’s the dignity in riding the Camel? And where’s the justice?
Peacekeeping Page 14