An Evil Shadow (8 page)

“They claimed, with some justification, that their
budget had been stretched to breaking point by the demand for young hogs that
year. The United Nations took an interest, but too late as usual. Doesn’t it
make you want to puke seeing Moncoeur at a fund-raiser? He’ll spend a couple
hundred thousand dollars tonight and have his picture splashed all over the
papers as a generous benefactor, but it will be only a minute fraction of what
he made off the hog fiasco.”

“Could Lausaux have been in on it?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him; the man’s a slimeball.
But if he was out to make a financial killing, then it’s my guess he would have
gone for a more straightforward scam. Diverting a percentage of the charity’s
income into a Cayman banking account would be more his style. He might not like
it, but Lausaux knows that Moncoeur’s butt has to be kissed if Assist Haiti is
to achieve anything. He doesn’t do anything without a good reason
,
but that’s the way it is on Haiti.”

As Bickford recounted the hog debacle, a great many
guests stopped at Moncoeur’s table to pay their respects. It seemed that his
influence extended a great deal farther than his native island.

The close-circuit television screens flickered into
life with a message that the auction would commence in ten minutes. Gradually
the guests rose from their tables to drift upstairs to the salon. Moncoeur’s
party was one of the last to leave.

“What about it, Val?” Bickford said. “Shall we stick
it out here or follow the money.”

“Here will do just fine.”

A hour later, as Bickford was extolling the joy of
hanging from a rock, a thousand feet up by your fingertips, to an overweight
oil company executive, Val excused himself and went in search of Duval. He met
her on the stairs, on her way to find him.

“My painting went for five thousand dollars,” she
announced proudly, her eyes shining with excitement. “Can you believe it? Five
thousand dollars.”

“Congratulations. Who bought it?”

“A Baton Rouge art dealer. The bidding started at a
thousand and climbed.”

Val hated to be the one to deflate her. “I wanted a
word with you.”

“What’s wrong?”

They found a spot at the rear of the lower deck,
directly above the flashing blades of the paddle wheel. A fine mist of water
vapor settled on them. It was dark now as the Natchez lowered her twin funnels
to pass under the Huey P. Long bridge. The wake was a luminescent green ribbon
trailing after them, and beyond the levees the city sparkled with promise. It
was too beautiful a scene to defile with talk of death, but it had to be done.
The slapping of the paddle wheel ensured that they would not be overheard.

He told her about asking Trochan to run down his
former partner and how, twenty-four hours later, someone had stuck a knife in
the man’s neck. He wasn’t going to risk anything happening to her, he said, and
explained the precautions he had taken. She took the news much as Val had
expected. Her good mood evaporated and was replaced by one of trepidation. He
tried to play down any threat of physical danger, but clumsily succeeded in
making it sound worse.

“You can help by being circumspect. Don’t open the
door to anyone you don’t know. It doesn’t matter if Marcus and Angie are there
—
it only takes a second. Do you have a car?”

“No, though Angie has offered me the loan of hers.”

“Take her up on it. If it’s not available, use a
reputable cab company and make sure you’re given a description of the driver. I
don’t want you walking the streets, day or night. And forget about dating for
the moment.”

“What about orientation week? I can’t remain cooped up
during that.”

“You should be safe enough on campus. All my officers
have been given a copy of the sketch you made of Jackson and told to keep their
eyes open. Remember that there will always be an officer close by. Use the blue
phones if you have to. Just don’t do anything silly, and you’ll be fine. More
than likely I’m over-reacting.”

“Shouldn’t I let Marcus and Angie know about Jackson?
They have been so considerate, and my presence may be putting them in danger.”

“No, I’ll speak to them. They already know that you’ll
be the focus of a hate-campaign from extremist groups and that they will be
expected to take precautions.”

“There’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“Would it hurt you to start calling me Marie?”

They joined Bickford in the lounge, watching the culmination
of the auction on the close-circuit TV. The Bentley had just gone under the
hammer. Inevitably, Jean Moncoeur had made the successful bid. Half a million
dollars.

They could hear the thunderous applause coming from
the salon above. It took a long time to die down.

The fund-raiser had turned into quite a party by the
time the Natchez docked again at Poydras Street Wharf. A quick tally of
accepted bids and pledges had placed the total raised that night to just under
two million dollars. Good enough reason to carry on partying. Although the
river cruise part of the evening was over, the quests would continue to be
entertained on board for several hours.

Val told Marcus that it would be as well if he left
then, hinting that the day had taken a lot out of Duval. Angie pouted a bit,
saying she was having a wonderful evening and wanted to stay and dance, but
Marcus was having none of it. The three of them drove away from the wharf in
Marcus’s car. Val watched as the campus officer in his own unmarked vehicle
tailed them.

Bickford and Val shared a cab. They were heading back
to Val’s place for a final drink.

Val gave Bickford his shoulder to lean on as together
they stumbled up the front steps of his historic house. Bickford had consumed a
lot more booze than Val, but both men were far from sober. The light above the
door was out and somewhere in Val’s befuddled brain was the recollection of
having switched it on before leaving. He reached above his head to locate the
bulb. A half turn did the trick.

The door was slightly ajar, its rim lock busted. Val
sobered in an instant. Signaling to Bickford to remain outside, he pushed the
door open with his toe and slowly crept in.

The house was still.

He switched on a light. Devastation was the sole
surprise lying in wait for him. His living room had been trashed. Bookcases had
been knocked over, the books’ covers and pages ripped asunder. Drawers had been
pulled out and their contents strewn about. Stuffing protruded from slashes in
the upholstery of his couch and armchair. His supply of bourbon had been
emptied onto the floor the bottles smashed. Pictures had been pulled off the
walls and their frames broken. The television screen was shattered the CD
player in pieces. There was a damp patch on a rug and the acrid ammonia stink
of urine was evident beneath the spilled bourbon. As far as Val could see,
nothing had been taken, but a lot of senseless destruction had taken place.

Chicken blood had been used to daub the rough sketch
of a cross and a skull with a top hat. The veve of Baron Samdi, head of the
Gede family of spirits. The lwa of death.

Val picked up the plastic bag, still half-full of
blood, and flushed it down the cloakroom toilet.

Bickford wandered in. “If I was you,” he said, his
speech slurring slightly. “I’d hire myself a new housekeeper.”

Val checked out the rest of the house room by room.
Whoever was responsible was long gone. Thankfully the bedrooms hadn’t been
touched, nor the bathroom or the kitchen. He picked up a fractured picture
frame that had held a photograph of his wedding. The photograph had been ripped
into pieces.

The phone started to ring. The one in the living room
was in fragments but the bedroom extension was still working.

“Val Bosanquet?”

He didn’t recognize the voice. It was a white man’s,
high pitched, natural, not put on.

 
“Yeah.”

“I hear you’re looking for Donny Jackson.”

“What’s your name?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Did you kill Trochan?”

“No. Shut up and listen. I have a message for you. If
you’re half as smart as I take you for, then you’ll forget you ever heard the
name Jackson. The Duval girl has nothing to fear from him.”

“Did Jackson kill her mother?”

“Cut out the quizzing and pay heed. I’m trying to save
your life.”

“Wasn’t Baron Samdi adequate warning?”

“What are you on about? Forget about the girl, forget
about Jackson — he’s someplace where he won’t ever be found. Watch your back.
The bastards who killed Trochan don’t mess around.”

“Which bastards?”

Val’s
caller
had hung up.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the morning Val drove Richard to his Lafitte
Village apartment house. He had caught a couple of hours sleep at Val’s place
after insisting on staying to help straighten up. As bombed as Richard was, Val
was still grateful for his help, and it wasn’t as if it mattered if he dropped
something. The former contents of the living room were piled up on the sidewalk
waiting for the trash pick-up. His wedding photograph scotch-taped together and
inserted in a replacement frame. Baron Samdi hidden under two coats of fresh
paint.

Val paid a speedy call to the UNOPD station house to
confirm that they still had Duval under surveillance. Then he drove across
Canal Street and took the Airline Highway.

The radio station he was headed for operated out of a
single-level building situated between a roadhouse and a hot-pillow motel.
Every morning for the past five years they had been broadcasting a short-wave
radio show in Haitian Creole to the Tenth Department, the name given to the
Haitian diaspora. The station had been firebombed twice and six months
previously the show’s presenter had had his car run off the road and both his
legs broken. A right-wing group called the
Front
pour l’Avancement et le Progres Haitian
, or FRAPH, was behind the attacks.
Amongst FRAPH’s ranks was a bunch of Duvalier’s former henchmen, the Tonton
Macoute, whom he had modeled closely on Hitler’s SS, except that in Haiti
Duvalier had added a theatrical touch. He had them wear white suits and dark
glasses, to fuel the rumor that they were Zombies.

That morning’s show was just winding up when Val
walked into the station’s reception; he could see the man he had come to talk
to still at work through a glass wall behind the front desk. Val told the
teenager answering the phones what he wanted and was told to take a seat until
the presenter emerged from his sound studio.

His name was Harry Nolan. He was close to sixty years
old and had been a legend in the civil rights movement for two-thirds of that.
He had been at the forefront of protest movements against segregation, Vietnam,
Nixon, Reagan, abortion clinics, and the Gulf War. His contempt for law
enforcement agencies was well known.

Initially, Nolan was reluctant to talk with him, but
changed his mind immediately Val mentioned his interest in FRAPH. He led Val
through to a small staff canteen at the rear of the building and organized two
paper cups of coffee from a machine. They sat at a Formica-topped refectory
table branded with cigarette burns. The presenter crossed his legs and started
to poke at a tear in his jeans.

The walls of the canteen were decorated with protest
posters connected to the various campaigns the station had endorsed. One of
them was of particular interest to Val.

“I did a short piece about Duval on the show this
morning,” Nolan said, and took a sip of coffee. He grimaced. “It would have
been longer, but we didn’t receive our invitation to the press conference. Must
have been lost in the mail.”

Val shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

“How can I help you?”

“I want the lowdown on FRAPH. No rumors or hearsay.
Just cold facts.”

Nolan’s fingers stopped probing the rip in his denims.
“For what reason?”

Val tasted the coffee. It was foul. “Somebody paid me
a visit last night. I wasn’t home at the time, but they made certain I got the
message. I need to know how active FRAPH are in the US and what they are
capable of?”

“Why don’t you ask your friend Marie Duval? Her father
was a big shot with the Tonton Macoute. They look after their own.”

“He’s been dead a long time. She remembers almost
nothing about Haiti.”

Nolan appraised Val’s face for a few moments before
saying, “FRAPH, an acronym for the
Front
pour l’Avancement et le Progres Haitian
, but also a play on the French
verb,
frapper
, to hit. To get a
handle on FRAPH, you need to appreciate that refugee Haitians here are from two
opposing camps, and they don’t get on. When ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier’s dictatorship
collapsed in eighty-six, a lot of his supporters — mainly the military and the
Tonton Macoute — were forced to flee the
dechoukaj
,
a prolonged period of bloody reprisals and civil unrest. President Aristide’s
attempts to introduce democracy helped to cool things down for a while. He even
told former Duvalierists that they would be made welcome if they returned,
though he passed a law forbidding any Tonton Macoute from holding political
office. Many took up the invitation and on their return helped to form FRAPH.
Covertly funded by the CIA and headed by Emmauel Constant, they are ostensibly
the respectable face of the right wing and the military. In reality it was
payback time. A second wave of refugees was forced to flee for their lives,
only this time it was the poor and the uneducated, so naturally the US closed
the door in their faces. A sizeable number still manage to make it each year,
with FRAPH death-squads close on their heels. To answer your questions, yes,
FRAPH is extremely active and is importing terror onto US soil.”

 
“An
ex-policeman was killed yesterday. He was working for me.”

 
Nolan nodded.
“I heard about it. His spinal cord was severed between the base of the skull
and the first vertebrae. I can show you press cuttings of five identical
killings — a method much favored by the Tonton Macoute. They also go big on
rape, torture and kidnapping.”

“The murdered man was trying to trace the whereabouts
of another ex-policeman. Why would that cause FRAPH a problem?”

“Who can say? They have their fingers in a great
number of pies. Did the murdered man
have
any family?”

“No. He never married.”

“Good. The Tonton Macoute likes to spread fear by
targeting the family of anyone who opposes them and they won’t hesitate to kill
women and children just for the fun of it. Watch your back it you’re planning
to go up against them.”

“That’s the second time I’ve been told that.”

“It’s sound advice.”

“Ever heard of a Haitian businessman called Jean
Moncoeur?’

“Sure. He’s a very wealthy man. He owns a large chunk
of lakefront real estate here in New Orleans. He’s a leech and a scumbag. It’s
my ambition to live long enough to dance on his grave.”

“Has he any connection with FRAPH?”

“Politically speaking, no, though he almost certainly
helps fund them. The Mulatto oligarchy has no great love for the Duvalierists,
who want to maintain the purity of the black race. But there is an uneasy
alliance between the two — when it suits them.”

Val pointed towards the poster that had caught his
attention.

“You instigated a campaign last year calling for a
boycott of Arena Victory’s products. What was that about?”

Nolan screwed his face up in disgust. “Fat lot of good
it did. The majority of American teenagers are too pampered to give a damn that
the consumer goods they crave are manufactured under sweatshop conditions.
Arena Victory pays the workers in its Port-au-Prince plant on average, eighteen
cents an hour. Less than two dollars for a ten-hour shift.”

“Slavery for the twenty-first century.”

“No, you’re missing the point. What AV is doing to
these people is way worse than slavery. At least slaves were fed, given a roof
over their heads, medical attention — however basic — when they required it.
The Haitians working for Arena Victory have to pay for all that out of their
eighteen cents an hour. Haiti was the setting for the world’s only successful
slave revolt. And what has it benefited them?”

“Could Arena Victory have engineered the collapse of
the hog livestock program to guarantee a surfeit of workers for their new
plant?”

Nolan’s eyes hooded over. “You’re very well informed.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“I’m positive they did. By the time Arena Victory was
ready to start
production, fifty other
American corporations had already set up on the island, greatly reducing the
available labor pool. Did you know that most at the baseballs sold in
this country are manufactured in
Haiti?”

“I didn’t.”

“The biggest overhead in footwear manufacture is
labor. Even with today’s technology,
it’s still a labor-intensive industry. That’s why a kid’s shoe can cost close
to an adult’s, although it contains much less in the way of materials. The
cheaper the labor the greater the profit. Arena Victory had a choice: pay
higher wages to poach workers from other. assembly plants or find a fresh
source of abundant cheap labor.”

“Why has nothing been done about it?”

“Knowing it and proving it are two very different
things, and Arena Victory have some of the sleaziest lawyers money can buy.”

Val took on the role of devil’s advocate. “You have to
give them some credit though. One way or another, they invested capital and
brought thousands of jobs to the island.”

Nolan jumped up, sending his chair toppling over. He
looked at Val as though he was a piece of dog shit.

“I should have known to expect a callous crack like
that from a cop. For a while I thought you were different. Go on, get the hell
out of my sight.”

Val started to walk away, weighing up the perspective
of a man who considers slavery an improvement on sweatshops, yet loses his cool
over a remark like his.

Nolan had a parting shot to deliver

“Bosanquet. Five thousand jobs to be precise, at
eighteen cents an hour. But if you have a scrap of humanity, spare a thought for
how it must have felt for the other hundred thousand rural Haitians who
exchanged life on their farms for the shanty town hell of Cite Soleil and no
job
.”

Marcel Gilett had to wait for the automatic spiked
gates to roll back. The second he judged the opening wide enough, he pressed
down on the cars accelerator and squeezed through. Less than two inches
clearance on either side. He drove quickly up the drive under the canopy of
oaks, past the swimming pool and the tennis courts. In the three years that
FRAPH had had him taking orders from Moncoeur, it was only the second time he
had been summoned here. A sure sign that Moncoeur, normally the most composed
of men, was rattled. Instructions were usually relayed in person by one of
Moncoeur’s American bodyguards.

Checking his watch, Gilett swore loudly. He was late
after taking a wrong turn off for Lake Shore Drive. Moncoeur did not like being
kept waiting, and Gilett had no wish to be the subject of the man’s ridicule.

The mansion, built on the shores of Lake
Pontchartrain, reminded Gilett of an untidy stack of encyclopedias.
Post-modernist, Moncoeur called it.

Gigantic slabs of gray concrete facing in all
directions, apparently at random. Frank Lloyd Wright on speed was how one of
Moncoeur’s American bodyguards had summed up the building, not expecting Gilett
to know whom he was talking about.

There was a brand new Bentley out front in the shade
of a cantilevered overhang, the showroom shine still fresh, the silver
paintwork gleaming. Gilett parked his junker next to it and climbed out. He was
met by a bodyguard and escorted to the mansion’s gymnasium. Despite himself,
Gilett was impressed by the house's valuable, eclectic furnishings. The man
sure knew how to spend money.

Moncoeur was taking a sauna. The air outside the pine
wood sauna smelt strongly of eucalyptus oil. He had heard the bodyguards saying
how Moncoeur liked to sweat the alcohol out of his system after a night’s
drinking.

Gilett hesitated.

“What are you waiting for?” the bodyguard asked.

He couldn’t resist it. He stripped off his shirt and
looked around for a towel or a robe.

The bodyguard grinned. “I don’t think he was inviting
you to take a sauna with him.”

Gilett fixed the man with a mean stare as he put his
shirt back on. The bodyguard held his gaze, something he wouldn’t have done
three years ago. Playing the simple, uneducated islander sometimes had its
drawbacks. Even some FRAPH people were ridiculing him behind his back. He
wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take.

He opened the door and stepped into the sauna. The
heat washed over him and for an instant he could have been back in his hometown
of Carrefour.

Moncoeur was sitting on the top deck where the heat
was most intense. Rivulets of perspiration ran down his face, gathered on the
point of his chin and dripped onto the bottom edge of the newspaper he was
reading.

“Good press coverage of last night’s auction,”
Moncoeur said. He held out the paper so Gilett could take a look at a picture
of Lausaux handing the old man a set of car keys. Moncoeur folded the paper and
set it down on the bench next to him.

Moncoeur’s skin hung in loose folds over his stomach.
His pubic hair was gray and his flaccid penis uncircumcised. Gilett wondered if
Moncoeur was deliberately trying to degrade him. Bragging of the half million
he had spent on a car, then more subtly with his nudity. Haiti may be the
oldest black republic in the world, but even so the color of a man’s skin still
went a long way in determining social status on the island. The lighter the
better, and there must have been more than a thousand shades separating the two
of them.