Hope House (30 page)

Kurt handed him a twenty dollar bill. “I’ve got only American cash.”

“No problem here. Where you want to go, man?”

“Straight out to Maison D’Espoir?”

The man’s eyes dropped. He was either going to tell them something or was stalling to manufacture a lie.

“No. I don’t ever hear of such a place. You go try another cab.” He handed back the twenty.

Kurt looked at Gloria then and she knew what he was thinking. This driver knew a lot about the alleged nursing school but was afraid to talk.

“Tell you what,” Kurt said. “Why don’t you drive us away from the airport, in any direction and I’ll pay you fifty dollars. If you happen to take a back road bring us to Maison D’Espoir, we won’t tell anyone it was you.”

“We don’t even know your name,” Gloria said, “so you don’t have to worry.”

The man put the car in gear and started driving. “I worry plenty. Mr. Puglisi can see all. He is a bad man. Very bad. A devil from United States.” The driver pulled out a machete from under the seat and held it up until the moonlight hit the steel and reflected into Kurt’s eyes. “You friends with Mr. Puglisi?”

“We hate Mick Puglisi, and we want to put him away—in jail!” Gloria blurted out.

Kurt pointed to Gloria and added, “This is my girlfriend and Puglisi has tried to kill her—and me! We’re here for a good reason.”

“A good reason?” asked the cabbie, his machete still in hand.

“Revenge!”

“Ah, yes, that I understand.”

“And we want answers of what’s going on at Maison D’Espoir,” added Gloria, “and we want to put a stop to it.”

The driver rested his knife on his seat. “You want to kill him?”

“If we have to,” Kurt said.

“You have to,” he said to Kurt through the reflection in the rearview. “He and Doctor Tad do bad things to the girls. Use them like
animals.
Doctor Tad, he treats the girls the best he can, makes them not suffer so much. Gives them good food and shelter but keeps putting babies in them—breeding children like a farmer breeds chickens and pigs!”

Kurt and Gloria looked at each other. She wondered what “putting the babies in and breeding them” meant. Was he
raping them?  “Is Dr. Tad, Tad
Boucher
?”

“I do not know. He is
just Doctor Tad to the girls. He is afraid of Mr. Puglisi too, that is what I hear. So he puts the babies in and takes them out when they are done and hands them to Mr. Puglisi with no fight. No fight at all. No one argues with Mr. Puglisi even when he sends the girls off. Even if they die.”

“What do you mean sends them off?” Gloria asked.

“Mr. Puglisi breeds the girls for white people like you to buy in United States. Like pedigree dogs. But they are human. Special babies that do not come from nature.” The driver sneered at them and moved his fingers to the machete again.

“Sounds like a place that ought to be burned to the ground,” Kurt said to reassure the man.

“God knows! Listen, when the girls cannot have no more babies, they are sent off like strays to fend for themselves. Mr. Puglisi locks the gates, and they cannot come back. No more money, no more running water. And their families will not take them back.”

“Why not?” Gloria asked. She couldn’t imagine parents turning away their grown daughters under any circumstances, much less horrible ones like the cab driver described.

“Because then they are no use to anyone. They can make no more money to give to the family. And no one will marry them.”

“Why?”

“Because they have the evil now. They have white babies but don’t have no sex with the white men. No sex with no one. Mr. Puglisi only lets virgins in. And they are virgins still when they come out. They have all the white babies, with no sex. It is the bad magic and the locals are afraid of them. It is sacrilegious, a mockery of the Virgin Mary! Besides, how do they have white babies when they are black women?”

Kurt looked across at Gloria in the dark back seat. “In Vitro,” he said.

She nodded. Maison D’Espoir was a real place on the map which was some consolation. It wasn’t a nursing school though but rather a baby farm filled with young Haitian virgins—who somehow mysteriously gave birth to Caucasian children.

Dr. Tad Boucher wasn’t raping the girls. He was implanting them with embryos from Caucasian eggs and sperm and so producing babies to sell through Mick’s adoption agency.

The financial impropriety and baby smuggling, however Mick did it, were   secrets the bastard would kill to protect. Especially since the biological parents on record with the courts were fictional. Names which were spinoffs of Gloria’s. Who were the real parents? Whose sperm and eggs were mixed in all those damnable Petri dishes?

Eggs were expensive. Gloria had looked into it herself years ago, thinking maybe she’d buy someone’s egg and at least be able to experience childbirth even if the child wasn’t related to her.

Gloria gulped. But these children
were
related to her. Her DNA was in Alison Gander. And all the legal donating mothers they knew about had variations of Gloria’s name, so chances were those children were related as well. Gloria wasn’t their mother but someone related to her was.  But who? And how?

Dr. Boucher would know. 

“You’ve got to take us to Maison D’Espoir. Right away,” she said. “You have to drive faster.”

“It is
a long drive up into the mountains. In the dark it is even longer. I will need more money.”

Kurt handed him a hundred dollar bill which the cabbie tucked into his pocket. “You
better buckle your belts. It is not going to be an easy ride.”

7.

JFK International Airport, New York, late evening

“What do you mean all the flights are booked?”

The hairy ticket woman glared at Mick. “Pat,” her nametag read. A fitting name. She was in her late fifties and looked like the mean crossing guard he had when he went to elementary school.  Pat leaned across the counter and bared her overly whitened teeth. Mick stepped back. You have to pick your battles and maybe this one wasn’t one worth fighting.

“What do you think people ge
nerally do when their flights get cancelled?”

He shrugged.

She continued, saying, “They come up here to me and book a seat on another flight, hoping the airport will reopen. Which it did. All the smart people are flying out on every available flight there is. All seats are full.” She made a “so there” face and Mick bit his tongue so he wouldn’t curse.  “All flights south are full. Sorry. No seats. Not till Monday.”

Mick would never normally tolerate that kind of disrespect but it wasn’t like he could do much about it now. He tried to calm down, tried to talk without puffing out his chest which he did involuntarily. Angie teased him and said he was like one of those little dogs, trying to make himself look bigger. He cleared his throat and talked more quietly.

“All flights going south of Manhattan are booked? Nothing? Anywhere?”

“Not Haiti. Not Tampa. Not Orlando.”

Mick looked around the airport at all the teary-faced children wearing Mickey Mouse ears or Princess dresses. A lot of tantrums appeared on the horizon when so many parents finally admitted to their kids that they wouldn’t be going to the Magic Kingdom today.

Not my problem. 

“Do I look like I want to go to Disney? Am I wearing ears?” Mick burst out at Pat, the ticket agent.

She rolled her eyes. “Where do you want to go, Mr. Pooglissy.”

“It’s Puglisi. Like the dog. And Leesy. Not Lissy.”

“Figures.”

What did she mean by that? “Listen, we’ve all had a long day here. Just tell me where I can go.”

She raised an eyebrow and they both laughed. “Okay, fine. Just tell me where I can fly to that will get me closer to Haiti than JFK.”

She typed quickly and picked up her phone. He couldn’t hear what she was saying above the din of disappointed children.

“We can get you on a flight to Atlanta
, which will connect to Miami, then you can get a flight to Haiti from there. It’s yours if you can make it across the airport in ten minutes.”

“I’ll take it. Point me in the right direction.”

8.

Tropical backroads, Haiti, late evening

Kurt studied the route to Maison, tried to watch for landmarks. But after the first hour and a half of going at a snail’s pace through a black jungle and up large hills with only intermittent moonlight and weak headlights to guide their way, he gave up trying. Everything looked the same. There hadn’t been street signs in over thirty minutes. Thank God they hadn’t rented a Jeep and tried to find Maison D’Espoir themselves.

But the cabbie knew precisely where he was going and how to get there.

Over the noise of the grinding engine, Kurt and Gloria had talked between themselves and were on the same page. True they knew a lot more than they did when they got off the plane but the burning question was still there. Where was Gloria’s place in all this?

“Here we are,” the cabbie said. He pulled around a final patch of dense trees and in front of a large wooden fence. Sensor lights flicked on and lit up the area like a stadium.

“Looks like the fort in F-Troop,” Kurt said.

Gloria nodded, staring at the crude but effective prison-like compound when a huge
African American man—Kurt had never seen someone so dark—walked toward them. He heaved the machine gun he was carrying around his shoulder to his front and aimed it at the car. 

“Who is there? You step out of the car now.”

The cabbie and Kurt got out.

“You too, in the back,” he commanded Gloria.

Kurt watched Gloria get out from her own side and was sick that he couldn’t do anything to protect her except pray this guy wouldn’t kill them.

“Hands up.”

The guard walked toward Gloria, aiming the gun at her chest. “You get over there with them.” He followed her with his automatic weapon.

“I need to see Doctor Boucher,” Gloria said as she slid closer to Kurt. He put a protective arm around her. “Doctor Tad Boucher,” she repeated. With Kurt so near, she felt emboldened, despite the circumstance.

“No. No one can go in. What are you doing here? How did you find this place?” the guard asked.

The cabbie said something in what Kurt assumed must be Haitian Creole.

He spoke quickly and Kurt couldn’t understand, but he was pleading. That was clear.

The guard lowered his gun.

“You should not be here,” the guard said to Gloria in a deep monotone. “It will only cause you trouble.”

“I need to see Doctor Tad. I have to know what’s going on in there.”

“Better you do not know. You get back in the car now.” He gestured her toward the door with his gun.

Just then the huge wooden gate of the fortress swung open and a beautiful young Haitian girl ran out.

“Boris!” she yelled to the guard. “
Anmwe
! Help me.
Prese. Prese
. Hurry.
Souple.”
She stared at him. “The baby is coming and I do not know what to do. You have to come. Now!” She continued, mixing her English and Creole. “
Kounye-a.
Now, Boris!”

Kurt looked at the girl’s midsection. Couldn’t be her baby she was talking about. She was skinny.

“Doctor Tad can help you. I do not want to see,” he said.

“No he cannot. He is
too sick.”

“I have business here, Martine. With the blan.”

Blan must be the word for us white folk, Kurt thought. The girl finally noticed them.  “
Ki moun ki la?”
she asked Boris.

He shrugged. “
M pa kone.”
Even with the language barrier, Kurt was keeping up. Boris, of course had no idea who they were.

“What is going on here? Who are you,” she asked Gloria, their eyes fixed.

“I’m Gloria Hanes, and this is Kurt Malone.”

The girl’s mouth dropped open. “You are Gloria?”

She walked closer, and mouth agape, staring at Gloria as if in the presence of some mythical god. “Gloria. You are
their
mother.” The girl reached out and gently touched Gloria’s cheek.

“Whose mother?” Gloria asked.

“All of them. All of the babies.”

Gloria looked at Kurt, her eyes unreadable. Hell, he didn’t even know what to think or what the hell the girl meant by “all the babies.” He couldn’t imagine what Gloria
must be feeling.

“Do you know Doctor Tad?” the girl asked.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She touched Gloria’s hair next. “So soft.” She put her hand down. “He wrote about you.”

“Wrote about me?”

“Yes, in his journal. I should not have read it, but he is dying.”