Peacekeeping E-Book

Mischa Berlinski

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 610

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A dazzling, bravura display of sex, small-town politics and the stifling heat of the Haitian sky, by the National Book Award finalist of Fieldwork. When Terry White, a former deputy sheriff and a failed politician, goes broke in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, he takes a job working for the UN, helping to train the Haitian police. He's sent to the remote town of Jérémie, where there are more coffin makers than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the dirt roads all slope down sooner or later to the postcard sea. Terry is swept up in the town's complex politics when he befriends an earnest, reforming American-educated judge. Soon he convinces the judge to oppose the corrupt but charismatic Sénateur Maxim Bayard in an upcoming election. When Terry falls in love with the judge's wife, the electoral drama threatens to become a disaster.

Leseprobe

In memory of my mother, Toby Saks (1942–2013)

Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

Part Two

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Three

1

2

3

4

Part Four

1

2

3

4

Part Five

1

2

3

4

Part Six

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Part Seven

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Eight

1

Part Nine

1

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Degagé pa peché.

Getting by isn’t a sin.

—CREOLE PROVERB

PEACEKEEPING

What you have to understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation is not fair. For my part, I have almost two decades’ experience conducting interrogations such as this one each and every day; most of the time, the suspect has never before been interrogated. I am certified in the Reid technique, both Level One and the Advanced Course; the suspect has not flown to Charlotte for the five-day seminar at the Airport Marriott in Advanced Tactics of Criminal Evasion. He does not know the rules in the way I do. He has come to my territory, my office, at the moment of my choosing. I am dressed in a suit and tie. I have my diplomas on the wall, and the shoulder holster of my firearm is visible. I have drunk my coffee, moved my bowels, taken a shower. I am not in a fine sweat and my heart is not beating like a bongo. And of course, the stakes are so much higher for him than for me: should I make a mistake, a criminal will go free, but I will still go home to my wife. Should he make a mistake, he will go to prison. Under these conditions, the moment a suspect sits in my office, naturally he is nervous.

That is always the first thing I say.

“ You seem nervous.” I try to say this with as much compassion as I can.“Is something bothering you?”

I have had many suspects simply collapse at this point. Almost everycriminal—indeed, almost everyone, innocent or guilty—has an urge to confess; later, they will wonder why they didn’t just stay quiet. Nobody who worksin criminal justice doubts that we are born with sin on our hands.

“We need to clear a few things up,” I say. “The sooner we clear things up, the sooner this will be over.”

Now I’m required by law to add, “You don’t need to stay here and talk to me. You can leave at any time, but I’d very much appreciate your assistance in getting this settled out, so you can get back to your business. You can also have a lawyer with you here if you like. Do you understand?”

In fifteen years, only a handful of suspects have availed themselves of their legal opportunity to stand up and walk out of my office. Only a handful. One was a seventeen-year-old boy named Antwan. He was accused of stealing a Corvette. The victim was the suspect’s neighbor, and the victim was sure that Antwan was the culprit. The boy had apparently ogled the car just a little too long. The car was found smashed up in the bottom of a ravine a few days later.

Antwan said, “I don’t got to be here, I’m out of here.”

“That’s no problem,” I said. “We’ve got your endotriglyceride levels from that doorknob you’re touching. We’ll match those up against the steering wheel,and that’ll tell us the whole story right there.”

Antwan pulled down the sleeve of his hoodie and began wiping at the doorknob.

I said, “Son, why on earth wouldn’t you want us to match up those endotriglyceride levels if you’re not involved in this? If you’re afraid of what those endotriglyceride levels will tell me, you should sit right back down. If the truth comes out later and you been wasting my time, I won’t be able to help you.”

I was right. It was the moment. The endotriglyceride levels never lie.Antwan sat back down.

Then I tell the suspect that he is guilty. Full stop. He is guilty, and I know he is guilty. I tell him all the evidence we have against him, piling it up layer after layer until he feels entombed by his misdeeds, until the suspect is well-nigh positive he cannot escape. If I do not have solid evidence, I invent it.

Sometimes I will tell the suspect that he was caught on a hidden surveillance camera.

Sometimes I will tell him that we have an eyewitness against him.

Once, I told a suspect that Madame Roccaforte, a very well known psychic here in Watsonville County, had given me his name. She had seen him burning in a lake of fire.

The suspect will start to open his mouth, and I shush him quick. If he were to speak, we might start to argue. An interrogation is not a debate. Once he says, “I didn’t do it!” it’s that much easier to stare me in the eye and say it a second time. Or he might ask for a lawyer. So I say, “Now is the time for me to talk. Your time to talk will come later. For now, you just listen to me.”

I do not want information from the suspect: I want a confession.

I say, “Antwan, all your friends tell me you’re a pretty good kid, do all right in school, respect your mamma.”

“Yes sir.”

But his voice is wavering, and he doesn’t make eye contact. He is biting his lip. He is staring at my Florsheims.

“But Antwan, I know you stole that vehicle. There is no doubt in my mind. Even if I didn’t have the endotriglyceride levels to back me up in a court of law, I can see it right in your eyes. So we need to work together on this.”

I let this sink in. And here, so much depends on my professionalism.

“Let me tell you what I know. They say you had that new job down at Arby’s after school. They say you were even giving some money to your mom. That’s good. They say you were running late all the time, having to take the bus down there every day, I could see that. And I know Lou Wendell. Oh boy!”

All of this has come out of my pre-interrogation interviews. Lou Wendell is the manager over at Arby’s. You don’t manage a successful franchise like Arby’s for eight years without being a prick. Antwan nods up and down slowly, but his foot is jiggling, up-down-left-right, over and over again.

“If it was something like that—you taking that car because you were running late, thinking you’d lose your job, and getting in an accident—I think everyone understands, a good kid like you making a mistake. On the other hand, if it was just that you wanted to go for a joyride, well, that’s another thing. Just take a man’s car, drive it around for pleasure, ditch it in a gulley . . .”

I shake my head once or twice.

“You see, Antwan, the law makes a distinction between what we call crimes of necessity and crimes of malice, between what we need to do and what we just do because we feel like it. So if you were feeling rushed that afternoon because you can’t afford to lose that job, and the keys were right there, and you thought you’d get that car back to him before he even notices it’s gone, and you needed that vehicle—that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

Now Antwan is bobbing his head more than slightly, if I’m telling the story right. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He doesn’t know that I’ve given him the choice between two stories. In one story, he can hold his head upright; in the other, he must live with his shame. Innocence is never an option.

You and the girl were just messing around; she was doing all sorts of crazy things; things just got out of control; you’re not the kind of man to hurt a woman. Or: you are a predator. Violent. A threat to society.

A newborn baby in the house? Family comes before anything else. Who can blame a man for looking out for his own? Or: you kited those checks to buy meth, smoked the dope in your own house in front of your own baby.

Which would you choose?

Now Antwan might say, “I’ve never done something wrong before, you can ask—”

And I’ll say, “See? That’s good. That’s real good. We can work with that. That shows this here was a misjudgment. That matters. I know what happened. I know this was an error in judgment, owing to the stress.”

Antwan will be silent a long time. Maybe there are tears in his eyes.

All he wants is for this moment to be over.

So I say, “Antwan, my wife and I been planning a trip to the Keys since last November. We’re supposed to be leaving tomorrow. I disappoint my wife and tell her our trip is over because I have to stay here working this case, getting you to tell me the truth that we both know about that car, waiting for your endotriglycerides to come back from the lab—believe you me, when I have to talk to the district attorney, you will feel my wife’s pain. She’s been dieting three weeks now, feeding me nothing but carrots. The first thing that district attorney is going to ask me when we decide how to proceed is whether you were a man. If I tell him how things really went down, about your error in judgment, about your stress—Christ alive, we all were young once. I can help you. But I need to know from you, right now, what happened.”

I look at him a long time, not blinking. The very second he looks away, I say, “Now tell me all about it.”

Most times it’s just as easy as that.

Sometimes the crime is of greater gravity—a murder or a rape. These confessions, contrary to expectations, are often easier to produce, despite the greater punishment the criminal will incur. For in these cases the criminal’s tension is also that much greater, as is his desire to tell his side of the story. He has been telling himself the story of his crime since the moment he pulled the trigger. This is certain: he has done nothing else but think about his crime. He wants to talk about the most significant thing he has done in his life. A car thief, a vandal, a petty drug dealer will not always understand the gravity of his situation, the consequences of his actions. It will not seem serious to him. Never so a murderer.

Immediately after the confession—and this is a moment of very great intimacy between myself and the suspect—the suspect will almost always offer a second justification of his crimes, an honest justification. It will come out as an afterthought. This is something he wants me to hear, and no matter what he says, it will remain between us. I already have what the law requires. Sometimes the justification is as simple as “I was bored and wanted to go for a ride,” and sometimes as heartbreaking as “I needed the money to buy my daddy’s heart medicine.”

No matter what the crime, I always say, “I understand.”

That’s what I hope you’ll say too.

PART ONE

1 There wasn’t much to the town, really—a triangular spit of land between a river and the sea, and shaped like the bowl of a natural amphitheater, most every street sloping down sooner or later to the azure stage of the Caribbean or guttering out inconclusively into twisting warrens of dirt paths, the houses degenerating to huts, then hovels. In the city center, old wooden houses listed at improbable angles. Energetic, prosperous people had built these houses and carefully painted them, but the salt air had long ago stripped away the color, leaving them a uniform grayish brown. There was a small town square, the Place Dumas, around which a flock of motorcycle taxi drivers circumnavigated in the course of every sunny day, maneuvering always to stay in the shade, and a filthy market where the marchandes hacked up and sold goat cadavers under a nimbus of flies. On the Grand Rue, merchants in old-fashioned shophouses with imposing wrought iron balconies sold sacks of cement or PVC pipes, or bought coffee. Jérémie had more coffin makers than restaurants. There were fewer cars on the streets than donkeys. The Hotel Patience down on the Grand Rue was said to be a bordello; word was that the ladies of the night were fat. Several little shops, all identical, featured row upon row of gallon-size vats of mayonnaise, which fact I could not reconcile with the lack of ready refrigeration, and bottles of Night Train and Manischewitz—local belief held the latter was a powerful aphrodisiac. You could buy cans of Dole Tropical Fruit mix, but you could not obtain a fresh vegetable; Jérémie was on the sea, but fresh fish was a rarity.

At midday, the dogs lay in the dusty streets panting, which is more or less what they did evening, morning, and night also, except when they copulated.

Whole days would pass discussing when the big boat from Port-au-Prince would arrive, staring out at the multicolored sea to register its earliest presence. The boat’s arrival brought a momentary flurry of excitement as the cargo was unloaded and barefoot men, muscles straining, eyeballs bulging, dragged thousand-pound chariots of rice, Coca-Cola, or cement through the dusty streets.

My wife and I lived in a tumbledown gingerbread, at least a century old and shaded by a quartet of sprawling mango trees. It was one of the most beautiful houses in all of Haiti. A cool terrace ran around the house, where we ate our meals and dozed away the hot afternoons in the shade. In the evenings it was (mildly) exciting to sit outside in the rocking chair and watch thick purple strokes of lightning light up cloud mountains out over the Îles Cayemites. It was the kind of house in which one might have found behind the acajou armoire a map indicating the location in the untended garden of hidden treasure.

The windows of the house had no glass, just hurricane shutters, and very late at night I sometimes heard coming up from Basse-Ville the manic beating of drums and women’s voices singing spooky songs with no melody. This was the only time Jérémie really came alive. My whole body would grow tense as I strained to hear more clearly this strange music, which would endure all through the night and well into sunrise. I had never before heard music like that. It was the music of a people laboring to communicate with unseen forces; it was the music of a people dancing wildly around a fire until seized up by some mighty unknown thing.

Only in these midnight dances would the languid tenor of the town change, revealing its frantic, urgent heart.

Our chef d’administration was a Trinidadian named Slim. His Sunday barbecues were animated by his personal vision of the United Nations as a brotherhood of man—Asian, African, and Occidental all seated together at plastic tables under big umbrellas eating hunks of jerk chicken. There were maybe a dozen of us there, in the dusty courtyard of his little concrete house.

I was talking to the chef de transport, Balu, from Tanzania—his long, glum face reminded me of Eeyore. Balu was unique in that in all his time in Haiti he never sought housing of his own. He kept a bedroll in the corner of his office and unrolled it at night. He had been living there for a year now.

I asked him once if this was difficult.

“I am come from African village!” he said. “This is everything good. I have electricity”—he was referring to the generators, which at Mission HQ went 24/7—“I have water. Maybe I am not even finding a house as good as this. Why should I be paying for anything more?”

Balu had been hired as local staff in Tanzania, supporting the UN Mission to Congo. He had done a good job and won himself a place in Haiti.

“I am not even number one in my village, or number two—I am number twelve!” he said. “If you ask anyone in village when I am boy where Balu will go one day, nobody will say, ‘Balu is going one day to United Nations.’ They will say, ‘Balu, he is going straight to Hell!’”

Balu showed me photos of the house that he built for his family. The house was large and concrete, surrounded by a low wall. It was the Africa the Discovery Channel never shows: Balu had a subcompact car in the driveway, and there was a flowery little garden. Mrs. Balu was a pretty lady of substantial girth in a magnolia-printed dress, and the little Balus were obviously having some trouble sitting still for the photo, all smiles and teeth and elbows. Then there were Balu’s eight brothers and sisters and their wives and their children and a congress of cousins and the elderly Mama Balu, Papa Balu having gone to his sweet reward.

I asked everyone I met on Mission to show me their families, and all the photos always looked like Balu’s: the concrete houses, the fat wives, the children, the new car, the flat-screen television. There was something reassuring and wonderful about those photos. If you understand those pictures, you’ll understand something about the world we live in.

When Balu gets back home to Tanzania, he’ll be showing Lady Balu and the Baluettes photos of his life on Mission. Somewhere in those photos there’ll be a photo of me and a man named Terry White. For reasons known only to himself, Balu insisted on taking a picture of me with Terry—he seemed to think, because we were both Caucasian American males, that we formed a natural set, like unicorns. He got the two of us lined up in a row and said, “Now you make smiles! You are beautiful man!”

Terry White! Who would believe such a name if it wasn’t his? No novelist would dare choose such a name in the context of Haiti. If you are white and walk down a Haitian street, someone will shout “ blan!” at you within a minute; and if you walk for sixty minutes, you will hear sixty voices shouting “ blan!” It meant “white!” and it meant “whitey!” and it meant “foreigner!” It meant “Hey you!” Sometimes it meant “Gimme money.” Sometimes it meant “Go home,” and sometimes, it just meant “Welcome to my most beautiful country!”

In the photo Balu took that afternoon, Terry the White and I are standing in a dirt field with some banana trees behind us. Terry W. had been deputy sheriff in the Watsonville County Sheriff’s Office in northern Florida, not far from the Georgia border, and nothing in his appearance ran contrary to stereotype of the southern lawman: he stood about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, heavy legs, and a pair of solid boxer’s hands. I later learned that he had been on the offensive line in high school, and you could see it in his chest and feel it in his calluses. In Balu’s photo, he has his arm draped over my shoulder: I remember its weight, like a sack of sand. His face was square, not handsome, but not ugly, the kind of mug that you would be unhappy to see asking for your license and registration, but would find reassuring when he pulled up beside your stalled Subaru on a dark night on a lonely road. His short dark hair was interwoven with a subtle streak of gray. He was wearing military-style boots, cargo pants, a gray T-shirt tight across his broad chest, and a khaki overshirt to conceal his sidearm. He gave the impression of brooding, powerful strength; a short, restless temper; and sly intelligence.

Terry was in Haiti as a so-called UNPOL, or United Nations Police, assigned to monitor, mentor, and support the fledgling national police force. The Mission was established in 2004, when the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled the country in the face of a violent rebellion spreading down from the north. In his absence, the new government of Haiti, lacking legitimacy, popularity, and power, and confronted with a nation in chaos, requested the assistance of the United Nations Security Council, which responded by creating this vigorous, well-funded multinational peacekeeping mission.

The theory behind the Mission was this: In his time in power, Aristide had dismantled the military and neutered the police force, fearing, not without good reason, a coup d’état from one or the other. The coup came nevertheless; and now the future of the country and the eventual guarantor of security and domestic tranquillity would be a new police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (usually referred to by its acronym, the PNH), which the United Nations would train and equip. For this purpose there were about two thousand UNPOLs in Haiti, distributed about the country, of whom there were about twenty-five in Jérémie: a dozen francophone West Africans; a pair of former antiterrorist commandos from the Philippines; four or five French Canadians; a couple of Sri Lankans; a Romanian woman; two Turks, both named Ahmet, hence Ahmet the Great and Ahmet the Lesser; a Jordanian; and one American—Terry White.

Now, I should say straightaway that people either liked Terry very much or could not stand him; and when people said they couldn’t take him, I understood. He was a know-it-all: “What you gotta understand about voodoo . . . ,” he said when I mentioned that I had been visiting local hougans. “What you gotta understand about the African law enforcement official . . . ,” he said when I mentioned one of his colleagues. He wanted to argue politics: “What liberals don’t understand . . . ,” he said. He didn’t let the argument drop: “So you really think . . .” He told me how many people he had tased, and he offered to tase me to show me how it feels. He called Haiti “Hades,” which was amusing the first time, but not subsequently. He called his wife his Lady. He was vain: I told him I got caught in a current down at the beach and came back to the shore breathless; he told me that his boat once capsized in the Florida Keys, leaving him surrounded by sharks. Even Terry White’s kindnesses had about them some trace of superiority: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call,” he said. “You stay inside. I’ll come down and check it out.” Between men, those kinds of declarations have meaning.

All that said—I liked him. He was, for one thing, a good storyteller and an effective, if cruel, mimic. When you talked to Terry, time passed very quickly. This was a kind of charisma. So when he told me about an argument he’d had with a colleague a couple of days before, I was all ears.

They’d been headed up to Beaumont, Terry said, and the whole way out, Ahmet the Great was talking about some lady they saw lifting her skirt and taking a leak on the side of the road. She was balancing this big basket on her head at the same time. There was a decapitated goat’s head covered in flies visible in the basket. “You gotta figure the rest of the goat was in the basket, too,” Terry said. Granted, maybe it wasn’t the prettiest spectacle in the world, this lady dropping to her haunches—“You probably wouldn’t paint the scene with oils and hang it on the living room wall”—but she did what she was doing with a heck of a lot of grace, for a big lady.

“What you got to realize is that those animals weigh upward of forty pounds,” Terry said. “Just try it, peeing like a woman with a goat on your head.”

In any case, it was Ahmet the Great who opened the discussion that day on the way to Beaumont.

“In my country, is big shame for lady pee,” Ahmet said. “Is never something lady do.”

Terry said, “In your country the ladies don’t pee? I can’t believe that.”

“In my country, is big shame lady pee like animal in streets. In my country, lady pee like lady.”

“And how does a lady pee, Ahmet? Riddle me that, my brother.”

“Not like cow or animal in street.”

This argument went round and round, up into the mountains and down, past seaside Gommier and pretty Roseaux and muddy Chardonette, one of those arguments that start out as banter but before long start to rankle, just two guys in a car, each thinking the other’s an asshole.

“So just where is this lady supposed to pee?” Terry said. “Just stop in the nearest Starbucks?”

“In my place, lady not make pee in side of road like animal or dog.”

“Are we in your place?”

“In my place, we have no United Nations. No peacekeepers. Lady not big shame, like here. My place is no-problem place.”

Terry looked at me. The incident had been weighing on him. There was hardly a tree in sight, a lady’s been walking since before dawn with a goddamn goat on her head, she feels the need—who the hell was Ahmet to judge her? People here gotta live in poverty, suffer from dawn to dusk, sweat rivers, and die young—and Ahmet, with his pompadour and mother-of-pearl–handled revolver and three-bedroom apartment in Ankara, is going to tell them in their own country where they can and cannot pee? What you got to understand is that this was the hajji mentality.

“So what do you think?” he said.

Here was an examination it was very simple to pass. “Their country,” I said.

“Damn straight,” Terry said. “Who the hell cares where this lady pisses?”

“Not me,” I said.

“What you got to understand is that for the towelheads—”

“I hear you, brother.”

“Those ladies—”

“They suffer, man. They suffer.”

I don’t believe Terry had expected me to capitulate so quickly. He seemed unsatisfied. We sat in silence for a moment or two, until from the other table a harsh, cruel laughter broke the early-evening calm. A couple of UNPOLs—one from Burkina Faso, the other from Benin—were trying to feed scraps of barbecued chicken to the chickens pecking under the table and were kicking away the hungry dogs attempting to steal some chicken for themselves. This was cracking the table up. Terry got a disgusted look on his face, seeing that.

“Knock it off,” he said. “You don’t got to humiliate those damn birds. It’s enough you’re eating their carcasses.”

The Africans laughed. Terry glared at his colleagues for a long time in a way that wasn’t friendly. I don’t think they understood the menace implicit in his low voice, or they thought laughter would defuse it. The guy from Benin kept feeding the chickens their kin. Terry’s stare was a prelude to standing up. It shocked me how swiftly his mood had switched from placid good humor to something nearly violent. An afternoon with Terry White was not necessarily relaxing.

Then the tension was over. The African UNPOLs backed off, still laughing, and Terry grinned at me: we were complicit, if but for a moment, on the side of justice. That gesture endeared him to me.

Terry told me that before coming to Haiti he’d been in law enforcement almost twenty years. “What you gotta understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation isn’t fair,” he said. Terry talked, he gave examples, and with a little prompting, he talked some more. Later he told me that his testimony had sent a man to death row—that’s something. How’d that feel? “Like it was the best thing I ever did,” he said, but not callously, rather as the only decent end to an all-around bad business. Terry told me that he’d been active in Florida Republican politics for years: at one point he’d taken a run for sheriff and lost. “Now, that’s a brutal game, Florida politics. Those boys don’t play.” So how’d you end up in Haiti of all places? He told me about Marianne Miller, Marianne Miller being his erstwhile rival back home. The upshot of the narrative cul-de-sac was that no one had appreciated what a terrific law enforcement official he was, not least the new sheriff, who had let Marianne Miller whisper poison in his ear, which had led to the complicated imbroglio that had led to the best interrogator in Florida being out of a job, then going broke, then ending up in Nowhere, Hades.

Terry was not interested in me. Not once did he ask what brought me to Haiti, what my work consisted of, or where my family was from. But had he pressed the issue, I would have told him that I had followed my wife here: she was a civilian employee of the United Nations, working as a procurement officer; and I would have mentioned that I intended to use my time in Haiti, after a decade working as a journalist, to complete a novel. Terry’s sole attempt to broach the conversational divide was to ask where my wife and I were living.

We rented our house on the rue Bayard from Maxim Bayard, a member of the Haitian Sénat. The previous tenant had left the Mission to return to Zimbabwe, and we had taken the keys directly from him, completing the details of the rental with the Sénateur by email. The Sénateur had left a small library of spiritualist literature, in both French and English, on the bookshelves: books on the interpretations of dreams, a volume on yoga, guides to communication with the dead, the margins filled with handwritten comments in bright red ink. This was all I knew of the man.

“Maxim Bayard is a maximum asshole,” Terry said.

It was like learning that Terry knew Mick Jagger. I leaned forward as he maneuvered his plastic fork and knife around on the table so that the fork was perpendicular to the knife, with a small gap between them.

The fork and the knife represented vehicles in the parking lot of the Bon Temps, a little hotel and restaurant not far from our house, where Terry had been at lunch with colleagues on a Sunday afternoon. “This was my car here”—he indicated the knife—“and this was a white pickup truck here.” He gestured to the fork. “And if you were backing up the pickup, maybe it’s not easy to get out, but there was plenty of space, if you don’t drive like a monkey’s ass.”

Terry had been gnawing on a chicken bone when he heard the crunch. He looked up. The fork had backed up directly into the knife.

“Whoa!” Terry had shouted, and all the other UNPOLs swung their heads around to see what the commotion was about. He was on his feet and walking toward the lot when the driver pulled forward and slowly rear-ended his vehicle all over again.

What Terry could recall about the Sénateur with overwhelming clarity was the expression of happy unconcern on his face. Terry had spent more than a little time as an ordinary traffic policeman, and he had never seen anyone cause an accident in this manner and subsequently display no trace of anxiety. “What you got to understand is that I was in uniform. I was armed. This was a UN vehicle,” Terry said.

And yet this man not only betrayed no sign of worry, he was still maneuvering his pickup to make a third try at the tricky turn. Terry figured that if he hadn’t walked over, the older fellow would have kept ramming his vehicle over and over again until sooner or later he succeeded.

“That’s my car,” Terry said.

“The wife of my driver, she is having a baby,” the Sénateur said in heavily accented English. “I cannot ask him to work, with his wife in the hospital.”

It all made sense in the Sénateur’s mind—you could tell. In his mind, there was some seamless chain of cause and effect that left him blameless and Terry’s vehicle dented. Something in his half smile suggested that to the contrary, Terry was at fault here, that Terry didn’t care enough about his driver’s wife. The Sénateur’s smile incarnated what Terry hated most: arrogance, impunity, indifference to the consequence of one’s actions. It was the smile of a man who believed—nay, knew—that he was above the law.

Then one of those crowds that seems to spring up out of nowhere in Haiti on a moment’s notice was watching Terry and the Sénateur. Terry could hear schoolchildren giggling. There is a terrible power in laughter: Terry began to sweat, and his face went red. The Sénateur began to laugh also, and he shouted something in Creole to the onlookers—the only word Terry could understand was “blan.” Terry felt humiliated in the eyes of his peers, who considered the encounter from the doorway of the hotel.

“But—,” Terry said, “but why didn’t you just stop after you hit me the first time?”

The man spread his hands out wide, palms upward.

“Mais mon cher, I had no idea that it would happen again.”

Terry looked at me. His story had captured the attention of the whole table. We all laughed except Balu, who was responsible for the Mission’s fleet.

“So that’s the Sénateur,” Terry said. “Twenty years in criminal justice, I never saw a reaction like that before.”

“That’s some story.”

“It’s some country,” Terry said.

Something in his voice—

“Do you like it?” I asked.

Terry was quiet for a long time. “What you got to understand is that Haiti is a lot like pussy,” he said. “It’s hot and it’s wet and it smells funny. You didn’t know about pussy, somebody told you about pussy, you wouldn’t think you’d like it much. Probably think it was something nasty. But you get to know pussy, you can’t stop thinking about it ever.”

2 In the little seaside village of Anse du Clerc, midway between Bonbon and Abricots, there is a restaurant and hotel. The restaurant is ringed by a neat fence; the grass is short and manicured; there are bungalows with thatched roofs and beds neatly made with white linens. The mosquito nets sway gently in the breeze. The bay is filled with fish, and for a few dollars a local fisherman will take you out in his brightly painted boat for a morning of snorkeling. The water is transparent and clean; the boat’s shadow ripples on the seabed. The food is good: redfish, langouste, conch, in sauce or barbecued, accompanied by heaping platters of rice and beans and fried plantains; and for dessert, thick slices of fresh mango, or pineapple and papaya. Solar panels power the refrigerator, so the Coke and beer are icy cold. The toilets flush, the showers run. In the afternoon one can nap in the deck chairs or play dominoes. In the evening a few guys from the village strum guitars. The little hotel is the only place in the several thousand square miles of the Grand’Anse that could remotely be considered a tourist facility; it suggests a labor of love on somebody’s part. It is paradise.

There were two stories about the little hotel at Anse du Clerc. The first story, the one told by foreigners, was this: She was Canadian and he was Haitian. They met in Canada as students and had children and then, when the kids were grown, moved to his native region of Haiti. She designed and he built this little restaurant: she had good taste; he was crafty. The region was inaccessible, but guests still came. Decades passed. They were happy. He went back to Canada for a few months. She stayed behind. In a storm, the road to Jérémie, which was hardly a road at all, collapsed into the sea. Then she contracted dengue fever; there was no way to take her to the hospital for treatment. She died. Several months later, beset by sadness, he had a heart attack in Canada and died too. Now the servants ran the hotel: the cook was a competent woman, and she had learned what foreigners liked.

But there was a second story about Anse du Clerc, a Haitian story: Madame was blan and Monsieur was Haitian. They met on the other side of the big water. They came back to Haiti. Madame built the hotel and Monsieur helped. Decades passed. They were unhappy. Monsieur had an affair with the cook. When Monsieur went to Canada, the cook seized her opportunity: she visited the boko with a scrap of Madame’s unwashed clothing, and he provided her with a deadly powder. Soon Madame died. Several months later, Monsieur died of grief and guilt and shame. Now the cook ran the place: it was her hotel now.

The first story was the story that foreigners told; the second story was the local story. The foreigner’s chief concern is: Will I get sick myself? Will my children fall sick? And so he investigates issues of health and disease. He takes what seem to be reasonable precautions, spraying himself with DEET at dusk and dawn. He discreetly asks the Uruguayan doctors about the risks of dengue. If he is prudent, he will think about how to evacuate quickly in case of illness. The world, the Occidental concludes, is a risky place. Danger is mitigated through prudence. Life is unpredictable.

The people of Anse du Clerc had different concerns. Rural Haiti is a place where life is fragile, transient: any day might be your last. The people who lived in this world did not want a set of facts. There was nothing facts could do to prevent dengue fever. Facts could not build a decent road. Facts did not give the people of Anse du Clerc a way to leave.

And so the people who lived in that world told terrible, wonderful stories—imaginative, inventive, and profound. The story the people of Anse du Clerc told to explain away misfortune was always a variant on the same theme: grievance led to hatred, hatred to magic, magic to death. There was a Creole proverb, “Pa gen mort Bondieu nan Haiti,” which meant literally, “God doesn’t kill anyone in Haiti,” and metaphorically that no one in Haiti died of natural causes. Where suffering seemed to lack an obvious cause, they invented one, and the thing that transmitted cause to effect was the supernatural. In this way of thinking, every death was a murder, every misfortune a crime—and the world made an awful, homicidal kind of sense.

But that’s the kind of story I’m telling here too.

It was technically the first day of spring when I saw Terry again, a few weeks after the barbecue. But what does spring mean in a tropical country? Flowers weren’t blooming, at least no more than normal; the weather wasn’t warming; nobody talked about picnics. After a while in Haiti I stopped thinking about spring and I knew that this was the hungry season, the difficult patch of the year before the mangoes and breadfruit were ready but after the manioc and yam were eaten, when the locals thought all day long about their nagging bellies. This was the food riot and revolution season.

But my first year in Haiti, I didn’t know that, and the excuse for my trip to the little hotel in Anse du Clerc was that I had written and decided to delete a page of dialogue. It was a windy day, bright peaks on the Caribbean and the sky streaked with long, fine clouds.

Terry didn’t notice me as I came walking across the broad crabgrass lawn that came up from the beach. He was dressed in a pale blue policeman’s uniform, open-necked, with the American flag on one shoulder and the United Nations insignia on the other. This was the first time I had seen him in uniform, and he looked a little stockier, a little more bull-necked, a little less handsome than I remembered. He was in animated conversation with a tall fat man.

I walked in their direction, and as I got closer, I could see the fat man’s light brown face, three chins oily with sweat; and his maroon shoes shined to a high gloss; and a bright red tie matched nicely with a light pink shirt. His cream coat was neatly over the adjoining chair. Then I could hear them, and Terry was saying, “You can’t let the sonofabitch talk like that, you got to step up—,” at which point he saw me, stopped himself, and said, “Hey now, Michael Dukakis.”

I had made the mistake, when I met Terry, of proposing that we drive to the beach in an Uruguayan armored personnel carrier. It was only a joke, but I suppose the image had sparked his imagination.

I said, “Hey now.”

Then Terry introduced me to Judge Johel Célestin.

I reached out and shook the judge’s hand, sumptuous like the best leather.

The judge said, “How do you do.”

His face was pear-shaped, substantially broader at the jowls than at the temples. He didn’t have much of a chin or jawbone, just a bountiful wave of fat. In his precisely trimmed goatee were curled a few snaky gray tendrils.

“Hanging in there,” I said.

“The heat not getting you down?”

He spoke with a neutral Northeast accent, the clipped inflections of educated American speech.

“Learning to sweat,” I said. “Never knew I could sweat like this until I got to Haiti.”

“Good man,” he said.

I trust first impressions, and mine was that this man was as out of place in Jérémie as a zebra at Sea World. This brother, I figured, had made a wrong turn somewhere round about the Bahamas. What he’d been aiming for was St. Croix. His handsome clothes; his refined, chubby features; and his general high-toned snooty air—he looked as if he ought to be shanking a 3-iron wide, dressed in knickerbockers and wearing a silly white cap, laughing things over with the senior partners. But here we were in Haiti.

There had been a kid on the beach asking me for money. Now he was at my heels right there in the outdoor restaurant, barefoot and wearing nothing but a filthy T-shirt down to his ankles. His hair was reddish-orange at the roots: protein deficiency. You could have taken his picture and put it on the cover of Save the Children’s Annual Report, both from the cherubic cuteness and the desperate poverty POV.

“Blan, mwem grangou. Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said. Blan, I’m hungry. Blan, give me five gourdes.

Terry and the judge were seated at a table on which a large fish had been reduced to a flimsy skeleton. A few grains were what remained of what had once been a rice mountain.

It was Terry, still sucking on a beer, who said no.

The kid looked at his feet, all confused. But he didn’t back off. He just stood there looking cute and desperate.

“Ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said all over again, as if he were turning the key on a stalled engine.

Terry said, “Ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît.”

The kid just stood there. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had all the time in the world. He was thinking things over. Then he smiled at us. What a smile! What the good Lord gave this kid in exchange for all his troubles was this smile, as hot as a hundred suns.

“Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît,” the kid said, figuring things out.

So Terry turned out his pockets and gave him some coins, and the kid, still smiling, wandered away. You would have needed a scanning tunneling microscope to find a spot of trouble in his soul: he would eat that afternoon. Life would take care of itself.

“I hate to see that,” Terry said. “Kid should be in school, not begging for money like that.”

This was such an obvious moral truth that nobody else I knew in Haiti but Terry would have said it. I had been in Haiti only a short time, and I was already coming to see that kid and his protein deficiencies as an irritant, like clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The phrase “breaks your heart” can mean many different things.

“Maybe he would be in school if he wasn’t making a living begging,” the judge said.

“Maybe he’d be fucking hungry if I didn’t feed him,” Terry said.

The way these two men bantered, you could tell that they bantered back and forth all day long. It was like watching them chuck a football, and after a minute or so, I interrupted them. “So you’re a judge?”

Terry had told me that he worked with a Haitian judge: the two somehow collaborated.

“Juge d’instruction,” the judge said, just a touch of snootiness in his voice.

“Wait—,” I said. “Are you Juge Blan?”

A smile, not modest, broke across his fleshy face.

“Some folks call me that,” he said.

I had heard the name a dozen times—from my Creole teacher, from the plumber, from the woman who squeezed our lime juice, and from the woman in the market who hacked up our meat. “Take your problems to Juge Blan,” they said, and it had taken me some time to understand that this wasn’t some difficult Creole proverb, but an injunction to encounter a living man, a member of the local judiciary who kept offices at the Tribunal.

Terry said, “You want a beer or rum or what?”

“I’ll get a Coke,” I said.

“Get a beer,” Terry said. “Life is good.”

“Coke is okay.”

“I’m getting another one,” he said. “J.?”

“I’m good,” the judge said.

“Cherie!”

Cherie was dozing in a chair in the shade. At the sound of Terry’s voice Cherie lifted her head, then shifted her torso, then rocked on her haunches, then stood up. With a sigh she ambled over to our table.

“Oui?” she said, putting her hand on Terry’s shoulder.

“Bring us more beers, and some cigarettes too, and another round of plantains,” he said. His Creole, after however long he’d been in the country, was good enough to communicate his needs.

Cherie was the lady, pretty in a fleshy kind of way, accused by rumor of betraying and murdering her patroness. The smile that she flashed Terry, however, suggested only flirtatiousness, sweetness and light.

The judge and Terry had been talking about something heavy when I showed up. They were still both of them thinking about that something heavy. It was weighing on them. They were thinking up one more thing to say to each other, that last and conclusive point. I was about to excuse myself and allow them to conclude their conversation when Johel said, “So how are you liking Haiti?”

I started to say, You know, Haiti is a lot like pussy, but instead I told the judge something like the truth: I had never been anyplace so dysfunctional, so rotten, or so very fascinating. I had been in the Caribbean before and had expected the light, the colors, the tastes. But Haiti had something different from Jamaica or Barbados: that profusion of stories. If you enjoy the taste of an overripe peach, then you might like Haiti; it was a place that sunk tentacles down deep into the soul.

“How’s your kid?” Terry asked me.

“Toussaint Legrand?”

“What a name!” the judge said.

“Still a fuckup,” I said.

And I told them the latest Toussaint Legrand story.

“I think he might have died if I hadn’t given him the money,” I said. I didn’t say it looking for praise or glory, because every foreigner in Haiti who isn’t deeply hard has done something like that: it’s just part of the Haitian experience.

“I hear a story like that, and I wonder if we were all meant to be here,” the judge said.

“Like destiny,” I said.

The judge reclined his head rearward and looked down at me, his sharp gaze skimming over his broad nose. I had thought he was drunk, but his eyes were sober and clear and humorless. He had that concentrated attention for which a man in trouble pays ten dollars a minute. “You think we got one?” he asked.

“A what.”

“A destiny.”

All you can really say to a question like that is “Maybe.” It’s easy for the guys drinking a cold beer on the beach to figure that this is the way it’s all supposed to be.

I glanced at Terry. “Do you?”

“No doubt, brother,” said Terry. “I know His strength. We’re all here for a reason. That’s what I’m telling this guy. I’m saying, ‘Judge, you can’t escape your destiny. You’re like a fish on a line. Destiny is reeling you in, and you’re fighting. Just give in, brother.’ ”

“Sounds like Terry thinks you’re a marlin,” I said.

The judge didn’t laugh.

“Where does Brother Terry think your destiny lies?” I asked.

“Brother Terry thinks I have a vocation.”

“I don’t really see you in a clerical collar.”

Now the judge laughed. “Terry’s been telling me to run for senate.”

“Where?”

“Right here.”

“In Haiti?”

“In the Grand’Anse.”

“Against Maxim Bayard?”

“Next year, maybe.”

Had the judge announced that he was auditioning for the role of Hamlet at the Old Vic that year, it would have seemed hardly a more grandiose or improbable a project than winning some contest of charisma and wiles against the legendary Sénateur.

And yet I once heard a man declare that he was going to rob a bank— and two weeks later he did it. A roommate in college joined the French Foreign Legion, announcing his decision in a voice no more swelling with excitement than that of the judge. If you meet a thousand people, one will do something that only one in a thousand will do.

“That’s ambitious,” I said.

“Things have got to change around here,” the judge said. “They have to.”

A dugout canoe was cutting across the bay, laying down lobster traps. Its motion, the swell and fall of the sea, the lapping of the waves—they were hypnotic. Things changed all the time in Haiti. They just always seemed to change for the worse. Even in the short time I had been there, I saw things declining. The road to Dame Marie was worse for the fall storms. There had been an outbreak of measles. A water pipe burst and now a swath of the town had no water. The standard Haitian response to “How are you?” was “Pas pi mal”—No worse. No worse was as good as it got.

“You hear the story about the ice chest?” I said.

“The fingers?”

Every election day, the story went, the Sénateur sent his goons around to the polling stations to offer the poll workers a cold drink, thanking them for their labors. Inside the ice chest, on a bed of ice, there’s nothing but human fingers and bottles of Coke, all those fingers stained with the indelible ink which identifies a voting citizen—presumably someone who had voted for the Sénateur’s opponent. After that, the poll workers often found their way to slip a ballot or two the Sénateur’s way.

“That doesn’t scare you?” I asked.

“In six years since we’re back, I have yet to meet a nine-fingered man,” Johel said. “And believe you me, I’ve looked.”

“Brave man.”

“Stories like that, that’s the way Maxim is,” the judge said. “That’s how he maintains and perpetuates power. He’s a talker.” That didn’t seem enough, so he added, “Was it safe for Martin Luther King to march in Birmingham? Was it safe for Gandhi? Was it safe for Nelson Mandela, spending twenty-seven years in prison? Was that safe? Things have got to change around. People can’t go on living like this.”

Terry seemed to sense that the judge had stumbled. He said, “What you got to understand—Johel and I are in the trenches here every day. You’ve got no idea what’s going on here, really going on here. People come up to us, they say, ‘Thank you, Judge. God bless you, Judge.’ People say, ‘If only you were president, Judge.’ People offer him money, he never takes a dime. Real money sometimes. You go anywhere in the Grand’Anse, I bet they know Johel. We go up into the mountains, they know him. And they’re asking him for help every day of the week.”

“What’s wrong with the guy they got?”

Terry said, “Are you kidding me—”

The judge interrupted him. His voice was soothing, calm.

“Is this a—confidential conversation?” he asked.

“I’m not friends with the Sénateur.”

“You live in his house.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“We’re not hiding anything,” the judge said. “But I haven’t made any decisions, and I’d prefer if this was—between friends.”

I nodded, and the judge leaned in. His face was glossy with sweat.

“You know the new road they talk about?” he said.

Jérémie was just one hundred and twenty-five miles or so from Port-au-Prince as the vulture flew, but the trip overland on the old road, the Route Nationale Numéro Deux, could take fourteen or fifteen hours, if the road was passable at all. When the summer rains set in or the fall hurricanes blew through, the road was just mud. Rumor held that a Canadian proposal to build a modern road connecting Jérémie to the southern port city of Les Cayes—where a two-lane highway to Port-au-Prince began—had been rebuffed by the government of Haiti.

“It’s true,” the judge said.

“I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t when I first heard it. Something like that, you’d think you’d hear about it. I mean, it’s a road. A whole damn road. Seventy million American dollars. Maxim Bayard won’t let it go through.”

“He wants a cut?” I said.

“Nothing like that. Government gives the okay, the Canadians give the money to the Inter-American Development Bank, the IADB puts out the call for tender, pays the winning bid directly. Last time, they awarded the contract to some Italian outfit to build that one up north. That’s a good road now. Government of Haiti never sees a dime, just gets a road.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“That’s just what I asked. I put in a call to Port-au-Prince. And what the minister of finance says is his hands are tied. I say, who’s tying them? He says Maxim will bring down the government if he signs the accord. Or worse.”

“What’s his deal?” I asked.

The judge spread his hands wide.

“Man doesn’t want a road,” he said.

“But who doesn’t want a road?”

“Sénateur Maxim Bayard, that’s who.”

“Why doesn’t anyone mention something like that?” I asked. It seemed to me the kind of story that you’d read in newspapers.

The judge said, “The Canadians are as embarrassed as anyone. That money’s just sitting there in an escrow account, waiting for a signature. Once the money’s budgeted—that’s a slap in the face. Heads roll in Ottawa, that money just sits there.”

The thought of decapitated Canadian civil servants distracted me. I was startled to find Cherie standing at the table with our drinks and plantains.

“What would you do if there was a road to Port-au-Prince?” I asked her.

“I’d go to Port-au-Prince and buy a new dress,” she said, putting the food and glasses on the table. She spun her skirt in a coquettish circle. “Then I’d never come back.”

“I guess a road would make some difference,” I said to the judge, watching Cherie amble back to the kitchen.

The plantains were salty and topped with piklis so spicy it burned your nostrils before it burned your tongue. The judge ate a plantain, then another. He tilted his head and considered me. What you had in the judge was one of those men who looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your intelligence and finding it lacking. Terry looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your manliness and finding it lacking. Between the two of them, they had all bases covered. “How much you pay for bananas? Or for mangoes?” the judge asked.

There were at least two dozen varieties of mango in the Grand’Anse, but my favorite was the mangue Madame Blan, a mango whose tawny skin sliced open to reveal pale flesh as inviting as the thighs of that long-ago golden-haired plantation mistress for whom the fruit was named. I had once believed that the South Indian mango known as the Alphonso was the finest mango in the world, but this mango was subtler, less fibrous, and more sensual.

“A couple gourdes, maybe?”

“I pay one gourde one banana. And I pay ten gourdes a mango,” he said.

“Is that a lot?” I asked.

“You know how much a banana costs in Port-au-Prince? In Port-au-

Prince, a capital city of a tropical nation, sometimes you pay twenty-five gourdes for a banana. Sometimes more.”

He was waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he kept talking.

“Rich folk eat bananas in Port-au-Prince. Poor folks don’t eat bananas. Poor folks don’t eat fruit in Port-au-Prince. You got babies going to bed hungry in Port-au-Prince because they have nothing to eat, you got babies swole-bellied here because all they eat are bananas and mangoes. You think that lady who sold me a banana for one gourde would like to sell her bananas for five gourdes? Sure she would. And you know why she can’t? Because there’s no road.”

He was quiet and I was quiet and so was Terry.

Then the judge said, “People here live on a dollar a day. They had three dollars a day, they’d be okay. Five dollars a day and they’d be great. They’d have enough money to feed their kids, enough money to pay a doctor when the kids get sick, enough money to send their kids to school, maybe even save a few bucks and start a little business. Buy some pigs. There’d be doctors and schools because people could pay for them. That’s five dollars a day, and the difference is—a road. It’s fine and dandy to build a school or some latrines or give away mosquito nets, but at the end of the day people still have just that one dollar they got to stretch out from sunrise to sunset. Look at that right there—”

And what was there on the fringe of the property but a magnificent manguier, dripping with fruit like money . . .

“Up north, a tree like that, you can get maybe twenty gourdes a dozen. A tree like that can give you—what? A hundred dozen in a season. That could be seventy-five bucks, just for gathering the fruit from your own mango tree. Two or three trees, and people around here don’t see that kind of cash in a year.”

Mangoes! An export fruit! Johel’s voice was sincere, eager, persuasive. A mango tree is for a small peasant like a little money machine: a mango tree and a road are school fees for your child; a mango tree and a road, and your wife has prenatal care; a mango tree and a road is a concrete cistern to gather rainwater, and that means you’re not drinking ditchwater. A mango tree without a road is a pile of fruit; a mango tree without a road is a swollen belly; a mango tree without a road is timber. And what happens to the mangoes now? They fall to the ground and rot—the pigs eat the mangoes and the kids go hungry. And why is that? Because there is no road. Farmers nowadays were cutting down these trees to make charcoal, the only thing you could transport to market in Port-au-Prince. Things didn’t change around here, soon the hills would be denuded, the topsoil washed away, and the last place in Haiti still covered in thick forest would be, like the rest of Haiti, nothing but barren hillside.

When the judge was done talking, his face was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Terry was with him word for word, nodding when the judge nodded, shaking his head when the judge shook his.

“Good luck with all that,” I finally said—one of those rare occasions on which I have succeeded in saying just what I meant, no more and no less.