Silent and brooding, he sat in the back of the SUV with his face in the wind to avoid the church-lady odor of Connie’s aftershave and chain-smoked from a pack of Comme Il Fauts and looked out the open window at the slums between the road and the harbor, the rubble-spread of shantytowns resembling landfills or refuse dumps inhabited by bent-over crews of scavengers, pigs rooting through the sulfurous heaps of garbage. What had Jackie said when they had driven past these abominations?—You’d never see that in a Muslim country. Pigs in the streets. It would cause a riot. In the front seat, Conrad Dolan scowled out the window at the city passing by in a haze of filth and the increasingly open violence of its population and waited for Harrington to tell him what Woodrow Singer had said to change his mind. Then they were well beyond the congestion of the capital, on Route Nationale One, and encouraged by the change of season evident in the countryside, the oven-hot air suffused with an aromatic elixir wafting from the flowering trees that lined the road and the vendors camped in their shade, selling watermelons and tomatoes. Tom felt the nostalgic sense of freedom he had always experienced, escaping Port-au-Prince. Now it seemed his thoughts were organized, questions clipped together like rounds of ammunition in a magazine. He poked Dolan on the shoulder to make him turn around.
Why am I here?
You tell me. I thought you had a plane to catch.
No. Why did you bring me with you to Haiti?
I’m not going to bullshit you, said Dolan. I was hoping you could bulletproof me. Tom knew the place, he knew the girl, he had investigative chops. If Harrington could not prove Jack Parmentier had murdered his wife, chances were nobody could. But you’ve already worked this out, Tom, Connie said. I’m not telling you what you don’t know.
Who’s Albert Neff?
You know that son of a bitch? Jesus Christ.
He was at the embassy yesterday. He didn’t talk with you?
The only place Mr. Neff wants to converse with me is in front of a grand jury, under oath. The unfortunate thing about family quarrels, Dolan explained, was their unintended consequence, another type of collateral damage, tripping over deceptions and secrets that no one ever intended to expose and all parties suffering from a distinct feeling of ambush and collision. While the Bureau wanted Parmentier to just go away, Justice was determined to use him as a broom to sweep out the dirt of a disorderly house. You’re a smart man, Tom. Nobody but Albert Neff wants to see Parmentier plea-bargain his way out of the hole he dug himself.
Tell me what you believe.
Dolan glanced over at Gerard behind the wheel as if to measure the importance of his existence. There would be a precedent, he finally said. My guy has some history.
That would be what Parmentier has on you.
Between you and me and the mermaids in the sea, said Dolan. You know who my hero was, the guy I hoped to emulate, the guy I wanted to be? Bobby Kennedy. The way he went after the mob. But during the Tampa operation, Dolan had received a call late one night from Parmentier, who said he was down on his boat and had a problem. You can guess this problem. This problem doesn’t take a genius.
Someone figured out what Parmentier was up to.
And that was that.
That was that. Jack invites this guy down to the boat to talk things over and ends up beating him to death. If you ask me, said Dolan, he did the world a favor, but that would be a technicality. Two wrongs can, in fact, make a right but that’s worth one complimentary glass of iced tea in hell, right? So the dumb shit calls me and wants me to come down there and help him dump the body in the bay because he doesn’t know how to drive his own fucking boat! Are you out of your fucking mind, Dolan said, and hung up.
But the pattern Connie expected him to see was not visible to Tom—Parmentier had let Jackie in, he let her come close, he let her see everything. Then she goes to you complaining about Arabs. I don’t get that.
Yeah, I don’t know, said Dolan.
Who did you talk to at the embassy yesterday? The DCM?
Yeah. I said I don’t know why you want to make my job hard but just make this one thing easy, will you? Let me talk to the staffer who showed up at the scene the night of the murder. No can do, says the DCM. The man’s been reassigned. Fine, I say, tell me his name, position, place of reassignment. Brussels, military liaison, but I’m not going to be the one who tells you his name, says the DCM. Turns out the woman he was escorting to Moulin Sur Mer for the weekend was not his wife, and the DCM promised to keep his name out of the investigation. Let me talk to her then, I say. He says he can’t do that, either, because the woman is the wife of some other person on the staff who thought she was away feeding the poor or something like that. I’ve talked to her myself, says the DCM, she never got out of the car that night. All right, I say, I want to see the report this guy wrote up when he got back to town. Have it right here, says the DCM. The bastard wasn’t going to give it to me unless I asked.
And?
And nothing. I could have written it myself.
What did you do yesterday afternoon?
Listen, it’s not in my interest for Woodrow Singer to know my business, said Dolan. He went to a downtown gallery to see the Syrian, an entrepreneur with a curious disregard for his property, a colonial-era warehouse with puddles of water on the untiled concrete floor, mold on the flaking walls, canvases stacked everywhere in disarray. He sold me a painting, said Dolan. You can have it, take it home for your wife. I don’t want that crap in my house.
The Syrian did not bother to forget the friendly American who came to the gallery often to use the copying machine. Oh, yeah? Dolan said. What the fuck did he have to copy so much? The Syrian says business documents. Dolan said, Yeah? Did these documents look like US drivers’ licenses for guys named Mohammed and Ali Baba and he smiled and told Dolan a long story about how his people had fled the Levant in the twenties and came to Haiti and lived happily ever after among the blacks, who produced a more amenable class of dictator than the Arabs. He wanted Dolan to know how much he loved Americans too. Working with the Americans was a family tradition. He said his father and uncles used to sell pot pies and lemonade or something to the marines who were down here shoveling out the muck in the thirties.
You’re saying he gave you nothing.
He inclined his head toward Tom and smiled indulgently. Maybe if I put a gun to his head.
But at the Oloffson, after Tom had slipped off to his room, Woodrow Singer had come back to the table to soft-sell Dolan on the Arabs. He said it was, quote, an OGA operation with a little fraternal boost from some people at Defense.
I don’t know OGA, said Tom Harrington. What’s OGA?
Other Government Agency. You ready to puke yet? A Washington euphemism beloved among the intelligence community. It almost always means shut up, don’t ask. You can take it from there.
Dolan continued with Singer’s explanation of the operation, people taking care of a diaspora of indebtedness, promises made but not kept, loyalties never repaid—abandoned cadres left behind in northern Iraq during the Gulf war, exiles from the Taliban, opium smugglers, mujahideen manques. The imperium’s tribal proxies morphed into a culled and select clientele, resurrected and reinvented on the basis of a nefarious range of criteria. Singer had told Dolan the Bureau’s involvement amounted to a courtesy, much like running an off-the-books witness protection program for people whom various agencies couldn’t seem to expedite through the system.
Kurds and Afghanis are not Arabs, said Harrington. You said Jackie was translating paperwork from Arabic.
Dolan said that he had to assume that Arabs were in the mix but that something had gone awry with the operational process. That’s the sense I get, he said, and that’s what Renee Gardner went out of her way to tell me. It had become apparent to Conrad Dolan that Parmentier and the Syrian were both assets, but whose? That th
ey doubled up on the forgeries meant a trap door had been installed into the protocol, but why? What it all added up to, Dolan wasn’t prepared to say. But my instinct tells me we should be looking elsewhere, said Connie, and that’s why I want to talk with these cops up there in Saint-Marc. They were on the scene. Nobody else I can find was on the scene. So here we are, or rather here I am. Are you going to tell me now why you changed your mind?
You’re saying Parmentier was—? He stopped himself because he always felt like an idiot mouthing the acronym, and his glancing experience with the men and women of the Agency left him with the impression of their incapacity to express themselves beyond the raw vernacular of cowboytalk or the chant of dataspeak or the glassy-eyed prophecy of Christian millennialism. In his experience, they were anti-intellectuals—civilization’s drones. He had seen them—handlers or case officers or field agents, whatever they were called—at their hangout, what was commonly known among the expatriates as the spook bar in Petionville. They were never furtive or discreet or genteel; they were, instead, simply smug, mundane personalities attached to a grand adventure or perhaps only a tawdry escapade, and ultimately self-important and tiresome.
Working with, for, under, alongside—fuck, I don’t know, said Dolan. Singer claims him, that’s what I know. But so does the DEA. Our Jack was busy. Jack was much in demand, given his expertise. Jack was industrious. From what I gather, the DEA set him up as a drug lord so he could squeal on the other drug lords. The margin for error there is as wide as the River Nile. Look, Harrington, Jack was running a hatchery for enemies down here, not to mention the old ones back in the States with long memories. My guess is the contract was meant for him. They missed him, got her. If my best guess is wrong, then Jack is where he belongs, behind bars in Miami, and my own day of reckoning is on the horizon. How much farther is this fucking place?
On their left, between the road and the Bay of Gonave, lay the thorny wasteland of Tintayen, a bone field for the ancien régime, and three years before Harrington had spent a nauseating week scouring its desecrated ground with an Argentinian forensics team, cataloging the bleached remains, corpses devoured by land crabs and swamp rats and feral dogs. Somewhere in a box he kept in his Miami office there was a file.
On the inland side they began to pass a ramble of blistered foothills, and visible ahead an eroding stack of parched mountains seemed to nose into the sea. Tom Harrington told Dolan they were coming up to the quarry and asked if he wanted to stop and Connie said sure and they slammed along through the potholes until Gerard pulled over.
They stepped out into the swelter of an amphitheater cut into the mountain’s flank, the dusty mineral scent of crushed rock and the blood-iron pungency of the opened earth. The sun like a dentist’s lamp in their eyes. More than anything, the living weight of silence bracketed up and down the road by greasy waves of mirage.
These were the boulders Parmentier would have hidden behind, they guessed, staring into the quarry, and then they walked across the baked surface of the road to the drop of the opposite shoulder and stared down at the coarse earth and its shrivel of weeds and brush and turned a circle to let their eyes sweep the pavement and then looked out at the shimmer of the distant sea. Dolan squatted down to pluck a diamond of broken glass from the pimpled tar and turned it over in his fingers before throwing it away.
Why here? Dolan squinted up and down the empty highway and looked at Tom. You know the road. What do you think?
I haven’t thought about it before. Standing here now, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
Yeah. I guess so. Sorry to say.
The land behind was wide open all the way back to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. About a mile or two farther north the ecology changed and there was a stretch of villages up the coast to Moulin Sur Mer. Between the villages and the capital, said Tom, there’s no place like this.
You can run to the quarry and take cover.
Or walk to the quarry and wait.
Yeah. Let’s go.
Something in the rigidity of Conrad Dolan’s face and movement as he turned back to the car made Harrington pause and he gazed down at the various patches of stain on the surface of the road—incredible to think that what was in you would one day burst out and evaporate or sink—darkened blots of oil or maybe an indelible residue of old sun-broiled blood or maybe nothing, waiting to feel the one thing he had felt most strongly in Haiti, what he had trained himself to feel, the faint or intense but always unmistakable presence of death, but there was nothing there for him, only his cold heart stalled on a precipice of feeling, but then as he surveyed the unloving desolation of the landscape that had absorbed the last moments of her life his stomach wrenched against a bloom of nausea and, for the first time since learning of Jackie’s murder, he experienced the stabbing power of loss. Death had made him ravenous for life—it was imperative he keep moving, seeing things, feeling things—and into that hunger had walked Jackie and she had enraged him and inflamed him with the fullness of living even as she imperiled his soul.
He stared up the road, imagining the journey beyond Saint-Marc, out ahead into the Artibonite, where mud men walked with hoes over their shoulders, imagining their sucking steps across the rice paddies, then the eternally disquiet city of Gonaïves and the massacre that had once occupied so much of his time and all of his passion, farther north into the Savane Desolee and farther still into the marronage of the mountains, the bare-breasted women gathered along the blue-green rivers with their wash baskets, and then the end of the road, Le Cap, where he had been reintroduced to his lizard brain. Up there something essential had shifted in his moral universe and the girl was not the cause of it but the invidious effect.
He looked up at the sky, at the towering clouds, and saw their magnificence.
Gerard asked if they wanted to stop at Moulin Sur Mer and Tom said he didn’t care and Connie said, On the way back. Tom revisited his inventory of questions.
This report you enjoy holding over my head. Who wrote that report? Was it a military sit-rep? Something about the people I had gone up there to investigate? A person named Jacques Lecoeur?
Yes and no, said Dolan. A situation report on file in the defense attaché’s office at the embassy.
Who wrote it? Sergeant Burnette?
The name was redacted.
Eville Burnette brought Jackie to me up north. Gerard was supposed to do it but Burnette did it. Did you know that?
No.
I didn’t want him along, but he came with us up into the mountains to contact Lecoeur. Did you know that?
I didn’t know it was him.
Tell me what was in the sit-rep. No dicking around.
The first half was you and the girl. The last half was about a UN operation to clean out this warlord Lecoeur and his gang. I take it they sent in a team of Pakistani commandos after you left.
I was still there.
Mission accomplished, from what I gathered. There was an addendum. Some raid or takedown of the cops up there last month, about the time of the girl’s death.
With American soldiers? That couldn’t be true. Gerard, is this true?
People say this is true, said Gerard.
My God. There’s another wad of good intentions you can shove right up my ass.
But they were thugs, right? Criminals. Bad guys.
Who? Which ones? Jesus, I don’t even know anymore. Goddamn it.
Used and abused. Go ahead and have a good cry.
What’s it say about the girl? Was she in on it?
It doesn’t say. Did you do the trach? It wasn’t you, was it?
No, it was Burnette, Tom said.
And then they medevac out of there leaving you to the wolves and that’s what I’ve never understood.
Yeah, what?
Why you didn’t g
et on the chopper. Why you stayed behind.
I don’t know myself anymore.
Well it sounds like quite a party.
You don’t know the half of it, thought Tom. I’m rethinking everything about the north, said Tom. That it’s very possible—very possible—that whoever survived this massive motherfucking betrayal that I seem to be responsible for tracked her down when they discovered she was back on the island. The only thing that seems to work in Haiti is retribution.
Good hunch, slim chance, said Dolan. From what I understand, they’re all dead or long gone over the border. Number two, all that time afterward when she was running around snapping pictures of witch doctors, why didn’t they take care of it then? And when she came back she didn’t come back as Jackie, she came as Renee, new look, new identity.
Someone could have found her out.
Tom, said Gerard. They are not all dead. I think you will be very surprised.
What do you mean?
The man who fought with the woman. His name is Ti Phillipe.
He’s alive?
Now? Maybe. He was the commander of the police in Cap-Haïtien but he ran away.
Explain that to me. How could that have happened?
The palace was very angry with the foreign soldiers for going into the mountains to kill Jacques Lecoeur and the palace make the soldiers give back Ti Phillipe and make Ti Phillipe chef of Le Cap.
Then, as Gerard explained it, the story became incontrovertibly Haitian. Ti Phillipe quarreled with the United Nations mission in Cap-Haïtien, the men on his force shot and wounded several Pakistani blue caps on patrol, the incident was repeated a few days later with deadly force returned against the police, order was not only restored but reinvented when Colonel Kahn called a truce and advised Ti Phillipe to find other, more profitable ways to make trouble than shooting it up with his conscripts. Before long, Ti Phillipe, with a newfound gusto for corruption and illegal activity, was quarreling not with Colonel Khan but with the palace, which did not appreciate the unlawful expansion of Ti Phillipe’s authority or the equally unlawful increase of his wealth. The United Nations mission was dismantled on schedule and the president’s quarrel with Ti Phillipe escalated into the bitter irreconcilable realm of the ideological, the result being an unlikely poisonous alliance between the erstwhile guerilla, the bourgeoisie, and the Armée Rouge.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 20