by Jon McGoran
The eyes leaned in closer. “Thcared?” asked a voice in the darkness.
Cyrus, whom I had disarmed last time I was there.
His eyes looked crazy enough that I was thinking he just might shoot me, that I needed to take the threat seriously. Then I heard my own voice saying, “Thcared thtupid.”
His eyes hardened, and I thought this was probably the end. Then Toma’s silhouette appeared in the doorway with a bag over his shoulder, and his voice hissed, “Cyrus!”
We both turned to look at him.
They snapped at each other in Kreyol until Cyrus tilted his head, waggled the gun pointed at me, and said in English, “And what’s the blan doing here?”
Toma studied him in the dark for a moment. Then he pulled a pistol out of his waistband.
Cyrus smiled and cocked his gun, still pointed at my head. All in the same instant, Toma smiled too—a tiny, sad, weary smile—and as his hand came up with the gun, Cyrus’s smile faltered.
The muzzle flash from Toma’s gun was blinding in the darkness. My pupils slammed shut, and by the time they opened up again, Cyrus was missing an eye, and his smile was falling off his face in chunks.
His gun fired too as his fingers responded to his brain’s final command, but he was already dead. In that second flash, I could see the red ruin of his face, his remaining eye blank and wide as it rolled up into his head. Then he dropped, swallowed up into the darkness.
I felt a tiny droplet of moisture on my cheek. I wiped it on my shoulder and kept my eyes away from the sky, keeping open the possibility that it could have been rain.
“He’s been challenging me since Toussaint died,” Toma said, still standing in the doorway. “I didn’t ask to be in charge, but I am. It was going to be him or me.”
He reached back and turned off the light, then stepped off the porch. “I didn’t like him, but I didn’t want to kill him,” he said as he walked past me. “If one of us had to go, I’m glad it was him.”
The clouds parted, and the moon came out, a thin sliver that washed everything with a faint light.
“He could have shot me,” I said, sounding shrill in my own ears.
Toma shrugged. “I hardly know you, man.” Then he turned and walked away. “Come on if you’re coming.”
69
We hiked without speaking at first, the birds and crickets making plenty of sounds to fill the void. The moon came and went, lighting our way and then disappearing and leaving us in darkness. Most of the time we walked through low, scrubby brush, but at times, we had to take turns hacking through the trees. Toma had grabbed two machetes, an automatic rifle, and a bag of salty plantain snacks. He shared the machetes and the plantain chips. The rifle he kept for himself.
I didn’t know the guy, didn’t know how to read him, especially not at night, swinging a machete around. But he seemed upset. I had no idea if Cyrus was the first life he’d taken, and I wasn’t ready to concede that he had no choice in doing it, but I understood his predicament. I was heartened that it still wasn’t easy for him.
“Fucking Haiti,” he said, bitter and weary, fifteen minutes after we’d set out.
I didn’t know what to say to that. He had a point. It was not a country without problems. But it had upsides, as well. People like Regi and Marcel and Elena. People like Portia. And it wasn’t my country to criticize. How many times a day did I say, “Fucking America”—and with good reason too. But I wasn’t Haitian, so I kept my mouth shut.
“The only successful slave rebellion in the history of the world. Did you know that?”
“I might have.”
“Yeah, well, you might not have. I never heard it mentioned when I was in the States. Spartacus, sure. There’s movies about him. ‘I’m Spartacus’ … ‘No, I’m Spartacus.’ Fuck that—who wants to be fucking Spartacus? I want to be Louverture. At least he won his fucking rebellion.” He laughed bitterly and hacked at a nearby tree branch, his voice growing louder as he continued.
“This country has such a proud history, and it’s such a fucking mess. Don’t get me wrong—I know it’s not all the Haitians’ fault. The Americans and the French and the Dominicans, fucking Dole Fruit and now motherfucking Stoma Corporation, they’ve been lining up for two hundred years—four hundred years—to rape us and kill us and take our land and our money and our resources. Then they all line up and say, ‘Poor fucking Haiti, the poorest country in this hemisphere’—as if it wasn’t the most profitable colony in the world before they squeezed it dry. As if they didn’t all get together and decide to make Haiti an example, to make sure those black slave-revolting savages would regret the day they dared to take back the land they’d been working themselves to death on, dared to string up the bastards who’d been killing them for generations on it.” He sighed, and his voice came down again. “As if they hadn’t agreed to make sure the first successful slave revolt was going to be the last one, too.”
He kicked a rock in the moonlight, sending it skittering into the brush, causing an indignant squeak and a frantic thrashing in the bushes.
As the silence returned, I wondered if I should chime in, but he was making a lot of sense, and he seemed like he wasn’t finished. Plus he was swinging that machete around pretty good. I kept quiet.
“We drove out the French, drove out the Americans, built the citadel—the Eighth Wonder of the World. Sometimes it seems like we can do anything, and sometimes the most basic things other countries do every day, they’re just beyond us.”
He paused again. Kicked another rock.
“I know what Regi thinks. About Toussaint. About me. But Toussaint was a good guy. He was my friend. Yes, he was a criminal, but he was born into a criminal world. You don’t play basketball on a football pitch. You don’t play Scrabble on a chessboard. He got himself born into Haiti, the poor bastard, so Haiti was the game he played. And he was good. He wasn’t a murderer, he was a thief, in a land where stealing is the national fucking pastime. And nobody cared until he stole food from those rich bastards who weren’t even eating it. Who weren’t sharing it or selling it or giving it away. They were letting it sit there while people starved. So what if he stole it? He got it into the mouths of the people who were hungry.
“Maybe that’s the one crime that can’t be forgiven. And when they chase him down and kill him for it, leave me to try to pick up the pieces, within days that asshole Cyrus is making a run at me. Cyrus! He was fucking seventeen years old. He wasn’t ready to lead a Cub Scout troop, much less a gang. And you know what?” He turned and looked at me, his eyes gleaming. “If he’d been ready, I’d have let him. Because I never wanted the fucking job.”
I was stunned by his eloquence and passion and smarts, and I realized I’d made some assumptions about him. It made me wonder what other assumptions I needed to question.
He sniffled in the darkness. I felt bad for him, and I wanted to reach out, maybe put a hand on his shoulder. But the way he’d been swinging that machete, I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t lop it off me.
“That’s how it is with Cardon,” he said quietly. “He seems like a halfway decent president, but I’m not going to get too attached, because they’re turning on him. Fucking Ducroix. Fucking Haiti. Even the cops are gangsters here.”
He was quiet for a few moments, and he turned to look at me, as if he was wondering how all this was going down. I felt like I had to say something.
“So why did you come back? From the States, I mean.”
“Because they kicked me out.” He laughed. “But I missed Haiti, too. It’s home. I love this country. I really do. But man, sometimes it’s exhausting.”
70
We came over a slight rise, and there below us was Labadee, the resort. The red-roofed cabanas were softly lit, and even the modern hotel rising incongruously from the middle of it seemed somehow subdued.
Out on the ocean was Archie Pearce’s megayacht—bright white and bathed in architectural lighting. We stared at it for a moment. Then Toma tapped me on the shoulder and we
moved down the slope toward the water.
The incline was steep at first, until we came to a trail that leveled off, winding through the trees toward a set of rough-hewn steps that descended to an open space behind the village of Labadie. A pair of dogs barked at each other in the distance. The pale moonlight showed a small grassy area narrowing into a path that curved through the village toward the water, lapping not far away.
Toma pointed down the path, and as we walked along, the trees and small houses closed in on either side of us. Behind the sounds of crickets and other insects, I could hear the gentle murmur of humans—talking, breathing, eating, the music of women laughing. We passed a couple of narrow paths leading left and right between the jumble of huts.
Toma paused, getting his bearings. Off to the side, I spotted a pair of young boys crouching in the shadows, staring at us. I nodded to them and they ran away. Then we were moving again, down toward the beach.
Fifty feet away, I could see the water sparkling in the moonlight. I heard laughter again, this time men. There was a small fire on the beach, half a dozen men clustered around it, sharing a bottle. They stopped laughing when we walked out from under the trees, but they smiled good-naturedly. From the twinkling in their eyes, I was pretty sure the bottle had made its way around a few times already.
Toma nodded at them and spoke in Kreyol, then pointed at me with his thumb and said in English, “He needs to rent a boat.”
The man holding the bottle waved his free hand around in a sweeping gesture and replied in Kreyol. He was thin, maybe seventy, with a scraggly gray beard and mustache. After he spoke, the rest of them laughed.
Toma did, too. Then he turned and looked at me, “He wants to know if you have a date with a mermaid.”
I laughed too, and the old man passed the bottle to Toma. He took a drink and passed it to me. Rum, and not bad, either. I took a second sip and passed it back to the old man, who passed it on to the man to his right.
“I wish,” I replied.
He laughed. “Non mwen se Klod,” he said, then very deliberately to me, “My name is Claude.”
“Toma.”
“I am Doyle.”
Claude nodded and smiled. “We are closed for the night,” he said to me in English. “You go where? Do what? What you pay?”
Toma cocked an eyebrow at me, waiting. I didn’t feel like I could answer questions one and two, so I took out my wallet and looked inside. “One thousand gourdes. For one hour, probably less.”
I held out four 250-gourde notes.
He raised his eyebrows and shrugged, looking me up and down. He took the money, then said, “You leave deposit,” pointing at my wrist. “Your watch.”
I paused. The watch had been a gift from Nola. It was inscribed. It was nice. But it was only a deposit. If anything happened to me, I doubted Nola would get the watch back, anyway.
“I want it back,” I said.
“You come back, I give it back.”
I unfastened it and held it out to the old man. His fingers closed on it, but then he froze as a deep voice behind us said, “Mwen pral pran ki.”
Instantly, the men around the fire went quiet. They all stopped smiling.
I turned and saw a mountain of buzzkill stepping out of the shadows. He looked a little more impaired than the gentlemen around the fire. Instead of a sparkle, his eyes had a gleam, and there was nothing friendly about it.
He was alone, just him and the gun he held out in front of him. He walked up and pressed it against Toma’s forehead. He took the watch out of the old guy’s hand and put it in his pocket. Then he turned to Toma, keeping the gun pressed against his forehead. He took the rifle from Toma and slung it over his shoulder, then did the same with the backpack. I thought about shooting him, taking the same chance Toma had taken with me, but I guess we’d gotten to know each other a little better since then. I didn’t want to risk it.
He turned to me, swaying under the influence of whatever he was on and placing the gun against my forehead. “Ki moun ki fuck ou ye?”
I only understood the one word, but it said a lot. I was thinking I should have shot him when I had the chance.
Toma translated. “He asks, ‘Who the fuck are you?’”
I didn’t know what to say, and I was concerned that even if I came up with something clever and hilarious, it would be lost in translation and no one would laugh. The big guy swung the gun away from my face and jammed it back against Toma’s head, barking some kind of question. He seemed to be getting angrier. I had a feeling this was going to end badly. But I was also worried that the game was going to go on for longer than I had time to play.
“I’m the one who knocks,” I said to distract him, trusting he wouldn’t catch the reference.
He looked at me, confused and belligerent. He swung the gun back in my direction, and when it was midway between Toma and me, I decked him.
He was massive, and I knew I wouldn’t drop him with one punch, but I figured with three or four, maybe.
The first punch was a right, square in the face. I kept my arm in place, blocking the gun while I followed up with a hard left to his ear that got him staggering. As my right hand wrapped around the gun, it went off, loud and close. I went in fast with the left again, connecting with his jaw and snapping his head around. His grip on the gun loosened enough that I was able to take it away from him. He was already teetering—probably as much from intoxication as anything I had dished out—but he was big, and he hadn’t seemed all that nice to start with. I had no desire to see what effect a couple of punches had on his demeanor. I hesitated, just for an instant. Then I brought the butt of the gun down hard against the bridge of his nose. He might have been falling already, but he went down harder after that, hitting the sand with a solid thud.
Toma looked at me with new respect.
After checking to make sure none of my fingers had been shot off, I knelt down and pulled the rifle and the backpack off the big guy on the ground, handed them back to Toma. Then I took the watch out of his pocket. I held it out to the old guy, and he nodded and took it.
He stood and looked at the bills in his hand, then peeled off one of the notes and handed it back to me. He turned to walk down toward the beach and motioned for us to follow, mumbling in Kreyol. As we followed behind, Toma turned to me with a crooked smile. “He says he never liked that guy.”
71
Claude led us to the edge of the water and showed me how to operate the boat. It was a low-slung wooden skiff, painted a bright pink that looked muted in the darkness. It was a bit of a mess, cluttered with tools, empty bottles, and other things. The tiny outboard motor looked better suited for beating eggs than a hasty retreat. There was a pair of oars, as well, and I wondered if I’d make better time with them.
Whatever concerns I had were probably mutual, though. As we loaded the tools into the boat, Toma quietly explained our plan. Claude clutched my watch tightly. I got the feeling he was expecting to keep it.
When we were done, though, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, “Fè atansyon. Pote bato mwen tounen.”
Toma smiled. “He says to be careful and bring his boat back.”
I moved a roll of duct tape and a corroded dry-cell battery out of the way so I could sit down in the boat. Toma shook my hand and then gave the boat a decent shove away from the beach. As I placed my hand on the pull cord, I paused and looked out onto the water.
The lights from Pearce’s yacht glimmered on the rippling surface. It was a massive boat and probably teeming with hired guns. As I went over the plan one more time in my head, it seemed like there were too many pieces. It came apart in my mind, turning from something solid into sand that slipped through my fingers.
But that wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way about a plan. Besides, I told myself as I yanked the cord, I didn’t need every part of it to work in order for any of it to work. A partial success could still count as a win.
The engine started right up. It was a din
ky little thing, but when I opened the throttle, I felt a slight surge as the boat pushed against the tiny waves.
Making sure I was pointed in the right direction, I took out my phones and erased the call history from the flip phone. Then I set up the interview. I called the burner from my iPhone, and when the call came in, I answered it and put it on speaker. Then I called the number for the interview app and merged the two calls. It was now recording.
Finally, I turned the brightness all the way down on the burner. It wasn’t completely off, but even in the darkness, I could barely see it was on. I checked to make sure the iPhone was still connected. Then I pressed the mute button and set it down in the boat.
By the time I had done all that, I was a hundred yards away. I killed the engine, took up the oars, and began to gently row.
Off to my right, the fake resort town of Labadee was bathed in a dim orange glow. It appeared strangely still at first, but as I looked closer, I could see movement in the windows of the hotel, a couple of guards walking around down below on the beach and the otherwise deserted docks.
Straight ahead of me was Archie Pearce’s yacht. As I got closer, I could see people moving about inside it. On the upper deck, a guard in tactical garb held an assault rifle. He was standing next to a large searchlight that could make getting away more difficult if it came to that, but it wasn’t lit at the moment.
Through the windows, I could see a couple of people moving around on the middle deck, in front of where the helicopter was perched. I couldn’t tell if any of them was Pearce.
More people were inside the lower level. That’s where Pearce would be. It was open in the back, a deck area just inches above the waterline. That’s where I’d have to board.
As I drew nearer, I got a better look at the lower deck. It was set up with lounge chairs on the near side and a café table and chairs on the far side. A single guard was pacing back and forth at regular intervals.
I knew I was going to be apprehended. That was kind of part of the plan. But if possible, I wanted to get inside before it happened.