Paradise Interrupted

by Penny Mickelbury

  “You’ve got a message,” Denis said, gesturing toward the fax machine with his head.

  CA4

  —

  “Thanks,” she replied absently, crossing to the machine. She wasn’t expecting anything today. She held her hand out to receive the paper and read with relief that Henri LeRoi was alive and recovering. He could not say who had attacked him, and he was forbidden from saying anything more for at least twenty-four hours. “Good news,” she said to no one, for when she looked up for Denis, to deliver the message, he was gone. She tossed the paper down and rushed out of the office and down the hallway to the kitchen, to find her suspicion confirmed: She had not armed the alarm system when she returned. She called out to Denis, running back down the hallway to his room, knowing that he was gone. “Shit, shit, shit,” she muttered, looking around. It could have been a hotel room newly cleaned by the maid after a guest’s departure. The bathroom looked the same way. She wouldn’t be surprised if he’d wiped the surfaces clean of his fingerprints. She left the room and slouched down the hall to the office, thinking that the positive spin on this debacle eliminated the need for Lionel Metier and his yacht, and for her to know how to drive a speedboat to get Denis to it Damn!

  She didn’t know what annoyed her more— the fact that she had allowed him to escape or the fact that he thought escape necessary. And escape from what? And why? Because she was pressing him about DEA contacts and activities on the island? Did he know more than had admitted and therefore had lied to her? She was imagining Jake’s response even as she sat down to call him. Yeah, it would serve him right if the cops picked him up and shipped him back to D.C., but it wouldn’t solve her problems; in fact, it would only serve to validate the suspicion the murdering drug dealers had a foothold in Isle de Paix. And that two sons of the president— and possibly his wife— were involved.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Carole Ann knew that she had given insufficient attention to Deauville, the principal town on Isle de Paix’s north end. She also accepted the unspoken reason for the omission: This was the domain of the wealthy, ergo, not the place to look for crime and criminals. It was a glaring, not to mention unforgiveable, oversight, a mistake she knew she’d never again make, and one she was prepared immediately to correct.

  She studied the maps of the island. Although most of what was geographically designated as Deauville was privately owned and therefore outside the purview of the Isle de Paix government, because the town and its inhabitants accepted basic governmental services, the government maintained certain proprietary rights, including police functions. And police functions, to Carole Ann’s mind, included enforcement as well as protection. She had talked with Yvette and knew that the police patrols on that end of the island had been met first with suspicion, then with bemused wariness, and finally, with open acceptance. “Free coffee and croissants any time at the Cafe, and free pate and baguettes any time at Le Bistro,” Yvette told her. “Makes me wish I still walked a beat.”

  Reminded that Le Bistro also operated on the north coast, Carole Ann decided that a late lunch followed by a stroll about the town, window shopping and stopping here and there to chat, would be a more productive entry into Deauville culture than in her official capacity as consultant to the government. Besides, if she spent her own money, she was on her own time, and therefore, for all practical purposes, a private citizen. So, in a manner that would make Jake Graham proud, she assumed her wealthy matron guise, hopped into her Jeep, and aimed it north. From her house, turning left on the Coast Road, the route was achingly familiar: Three miles along the road she reached the still-scorched place where Paul Francois had lost his life and saw amazing evidence of life’s struggle to overcome death. Green was showing through the scorched black, the new growth even beginning to encroach upon the cut into the forest. Roland had told her that he’d had the destroyed equipment removed, and its absence gave the area the look of desolation rather than of despair.

  Carole Ann continued driving, though more slowly now. She was riding parallel to the marijuana field and she wanted to see if there was any indication of egress into the forest. She didn’t expect there would be, and she was certain that Yvette and David already would have looked for something so obvious. Still, she looked. She also wanted to give visual credence to what she knew to be factual: That she was approaching the widest part of the island and that inland from here were the sugar cane and lumber plantations. She knew that the road leading to them was on the other coast— on the Atlantic side— but she wanted to fix in her memory a clear portrait of the terrain.

  The road rose and curved inward, revealing an endless expanse of sea. She was looking due north. The Caribbean lay immediately before her and, in the distance, the Atlantic. Somewhere in between, the islands of Puerto Rico and Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that Siamese twin island, half French and half Spanish and as different from each other as if they lived in different oceans. Indeed the single island that was both Haiti and the Dominican Republic were reflective of the dual nature of these islands: Caribbean on one side, Atlantic on the other; exclusive on one side, egalitarian on the other. At least here on Isle de Paix, she thought, the differences were not as stunning. Or were they, and she had chosen not to see them? As she had chosen not to assign the possibility of Deauville as the source of the evil lurking on the island.

  She rounded the tip of the island and began the descent down the Atlantic side. Tile roofs and turrets took turns vying with the shale cliffs for recognition on one side of the road, the Atlantic awesome on the other, and once around the bend, Deauville itself, a tiny French village plucked from its European roots, air-lifted across the Atlantic, and planted here, on this cliff-side. The traffic, such as it was, all things being relative, was French-like, too, Carole Ann noted sourly, as she waited for a parking space. How could there be traffic congestion in such a tiny place, she wondered? And where did all these cars come from? There were more cars parked on this one street than she’d seen in all of Ville de Paix. Every other parking space was occupied by a shiny, new American vehicle, something she’d never been aware of, she realized, squinting to read the manufacturer’s name on the bumper. Then she saw the rental car logo and remembered that there was a car rental agency at the airstrip.

  “Dammit!” she exclaimed and smacked the steering much too hard with the palm of her hand. “Damn,” she said again, with considerably less emotion, massaging her hand, but the realization that had struck remained sharp: There was a paved road from South Coast Road leading to the island airstrip and, according to one of the older maps, there once had been paved roads from the airstrip into the interior of the island; there once had been a small community of cane-cutters and log-splitters living in the interior north of the airstrip. That community no longer existed but some semblance of those old roads must remain, she reasoned, because that’s how Denis St.Almain said he managed to reach the marijuana field without being noticed. She closed her eyes and pulled his words into memory: “I angled up through the woods from the tarmac,” is what he’d told her, and he couldn’t have managed it, given the density of the underbrush, without some kind of road. That, no doubt, also is how he reached her house undetected. She hadn’t attached significance to his words before, especially the word, ‘tarmac.’ “Better late than never,” she muttered to herself, not entirely convinced of the truth of that sentiment. Late could be deadly.

  She swung into a parking space, climbed out of the Jeep and locked it, the myriad thoughts clicking into places of logic and rationality. There were pieces missing, certainly, but there also was beginning to be form to the pieces that existed. She began to stroll, looking about in the way of the tourist but paying close and careful attention to every detail of the scenery before her, and it was lovely scenery. She had parked on Deauville’s main street which, in keeping with apparent island tradition, bore no name. Perhaps it didn’t need one. Certainly it was the widest street in the village, and home to trendiest of everything Deauvi
lle had to offer. Though the sidewalks were paved concrete, the street was cobblestone, like the main street in Ville de Paix.

  Most of the shops and stores were fronted with French doors and windows, sparkling in the sunlight beneath sloping and rounded thatched roofs. She was not the only stroller; in fact, the sidewalks were crowded, as were many of the shops and most of the eateries, but she was aware of the difference in the crowd on this end of the island. There was less hustle and bustle, less energy, less electricity. No doubt part of it had to do with the fact that none of these people had just disembarked from cruise ship confinement. The other part had to do with the fact that those tourists who booked accommodations on this side of the island probably were not the kind to wear cut-off jeans and flip-flops to lunch. There was, she knew, a mammoth and exclusive resort half a mile from here, nestled into one of the low-hanging cliffs, and she expected that a good number of her fellow window shoppers were lodged there; and the others, no doubt, guests at one of the two dozen or so other hotels, inns, and guest houses of various sizes and degrees of elegance. She wondered as she surveyed the crowd, which of the strollers might be a native, a permanent resident? A member of the de Villages family? She had no way of knowing.

  The end of the street narrowed and petered out into a lane of saltbox houses, reminding Carole Ann of every east coast beach town she’d ever visited, from Georgia to New Jersey. The clapboard structures were painted white or gray, a periodic pastel thrown in here and there. There were a least a dozen of them, single-storey and multi-storied, and in the yards of most of them, one of the shiny, new rental cars. The tourists who rented these houses certainly enjoyed easy access to town, but if they came here to enjoy the beach, they needed a car. True, the view of the Atlantic Ocean was just at the end of the street. A dip in the brine was down a steep cliff and around a windy road.

  She turned her attention away from the saltbox houses and back to the main street, aware, again, of the parallels between Deauville and Ville de Paix: Here, at the end of the street, before giving way to the residential strip, were the post office, the bank— the de Villages bank— the money exchange, and the tourist bureau. All that was missing was Government House. She crossed over to the other side of the street, hoping that by the time she reached the end, the crowd in Le Bistro would have thinned and she could get a table. Her appetite increased as she passed a butcher shop that easily would have been at home in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, though she wondered where the meat came from. It had not occurred to her to eat meat when the seafood was so plentiful and the ways of cooking it so artful. Then she understood, fully, in that moment, why tourism was so important to this and all the islands of the Caribbean: Residents imported almost everything and could not afford to do so without the income from tourist dollars.

  “Madame Gibson!”

  She turned, startled, to see who was calling her, and she smiled when she spied Toussaint Remy’s neighbor in the doorway of the butcher shop. “Madame St. Georges,” she said, turning back. She greeted the older woman with kisses to both cheeks. “How nice to see you! How is Monsieur Remy? Are his hands healing?”

  The woman shook her head sadly. “He acts now like an old man.” She shook her head again, then brightened. “You are still coming to dinner with us on Saturday, yes?”

  Carole Ann smiled, too. “Nothing could keep me away, Madame St. Georges.”

  “Bon. That is the only time he smiles, when he talks of your visit.”

  “I may even come early, then!” Carole Ann said with a smile, and asked whether she could bring anything, hoping that she wasn’t offending, relieved to notice that her offer had been well-received, though politely refused.

  “Mai, non, Madame.” Then she gave Carole Ann an appraising head-to-toe glance. “You are working on the north end of the island today,” she said, and it was a statement filled with both knowledge and understanding.

  “I realized that I know very little about Deauville,” she replied carefully.

  “And I, Madame, know everything about Deauville. Perhaps you will ask me questions and I will give you answers, eh?”

  Could it be so simple? Carole Ann smiled without speaking, her immediate shift into lawyer mode only part of the reason. In truth, she could think of nothing to say.

  “I am cook for Monsieur de Villages,” the woman added in a low voice, “just as my mother was cook for Monsieur de Villages. And on special occasions, I also cook for Madame le Presidente.”

  Carole Ann continued her stroll along the Deauville main street, seeing with new eyes. She truly felt as if blinders had been removed, allowing her to see on all sides, the full picture, for the first time since her arrival here. She also felt truly relieved and lightened. She was able to stop thinking about anything but the beauty of the day and of her surroundings. She stopped in a small gallery and admired the work of a couple of local artists. She ate a hearty meal at Le Bistro, only reluctantly denying herself a glass of wine; that’s how good she felt, that she seriously considered drinking wine with lunch. She walked for a while more after eating, instilling in her memory the lay of the land. She wanted to know Deauville’s main artery as well as she knew Ville de Paix.

  Then, as she reached the end of the street, she wondered how the residents of the saltbox beach houses reached them. No cars could pass through the narrow end of the street to the lane. Could they? She turned around and walked back down the street, more briskly this time, as if on a mission. As if to prove it, she strode into the Bureau de Change, removing her wallet from her purse. She waited in a short line, listening to conversation in French, English, Dutch and German. When it was her turn at the window, she exchanged pleasantries in French with the teller, and exchanged Travelers Cheques for island currency. She left the building and stood outside the door, slightly off to the left, taking time to carefully tuck the cash into her wallet, and just as carefully tucking the wallet into her purse, all the while satisfying her belief that vehicular traffic could not the enter the enclave from the main road. How, then, did the inhabitants get their cars back there?

  She put her sunglasses on and turned toward the end of the street. She stepped carefully as the paved sidewalk gave way to a concrete-set gravel that was solid though uneven, and she found herself wondering whether this would be an effective and efficient method of paving the roads of Ville de Paix. She’d have to bring Roland up here to take a look. She hung her purse on her shoulder and, like a tourist, strolled along the lane, looking from side to side. It reminded her very much of the street on which she lived— on the street where Henri LeRoi had lived. Well-tended grass verges took the place of curbs and sidewalks, bordered by equally well-tended tropical foliage. These houses, though, were much newer than those on her street; in fact, she doubted that this development was more than five or six years old, and it clearly was a development. All the houses, though marginally different from each other, retained an inescapable similarity. They were designed by the same architect and built by the same developer.

  She looked up at the sky, looking for the sun. She’d lost her bearings and she wanted to know in which direction she was walking. This development didn’t exist on any map she’d seen, and she wanted to be able to place it. When she looked back down at the road, toward the nearest house, she caught her breath. From the house directly to her right emerged “the pirate” with another man. She willed herself to keep strolling, to keep behaving like a tourist. To stop suddenly would draw attention and she knew he easily would recognize her, but neither man looked her way, and without looking at or speaking to each other, they got into a green compact car and before the doors had closed, Carole Ann had turned around and was walking briskly the other way. She knew the car couldn’t follow and she hoped that by the time it had backed down the driveway, she’d be too far away to be recognizable. She did regret, however, not being able to get the license plate number of the car.

  “Not a problem,” Yvette Casson said easily. “I think I can get a roster of
all the rental cars on the island without too much difficulty. You’d be amazed at the spirit of co-operation afoot on the island these days,” she added cheerfully.

  Carole Ann returned a sour response. “But that won’t really tell us anything, will it?”

  The chief raised an eyebrow at her. “I’d call finding out who held you and Roland and gunpoint quite a bit of something, Carole Ann, especially if we can connect him to the guns that killed those constables. We may even be able to find out how long he’s been on the island, and, depending on how many cars are rented out to that location, get some idea of how transient the population up there is. Or not, as the case may be. At the very least, we’ll have a name that we can run through NASIS. And before you panic,” she said, raising a hand at the look on Carole Ann’s face, “I won’t say a word to David...at least for a few days. He’s off-island anyway.”

  Carole Ann panicked anyway. “Where is he?”

  Yvette laughed. “Relax. He and his wife went to St. Bart’s for the weekend. There’s a jazz festival over there. I was thinking about going myself, but things are little too squirrelly for us both to be away. Now, about these enclaves—”

  They spent the better part of the next hour discussing what might remain of the village of the cane cutters and loggers in the interior, and the origin of the new Deauville community, neither of which appeared on any of the maps in Yvette’s possession. “Did you all, by chance, order any new topographical surveys and maps?”

  Carole Ann shook her head. “We worked from the most recent one, which is almost ten years old, and Philippe said nothing new had been built in the intervening years.”

  “You think he doesn’t know about those houses?” Yvette sounded both doubtful and incredulous.

  “I think he doesn’t think about Deauville when he thinks about Isle de Paix,” Carole Ann replied. “I think he thinks only about what he’s responsible for.”