There is a Land (A Libète Limyè Mystery) (40 page)

— Anba. The Son pointed down the mountain.

The soldiers said something, argued briefly, before the driver acquiesced. The Son rushed to grab his things before their minds changed, and soon they were trundling down the mountain’s unforgiving road.

The journey into Menard passed in a blur, but he paid the changing landscape no heed. He heard pooled blood swish about the body bag and imagined the man’s face and the bullet hole, all the while lamenting that he had not been the one to put it there.

Libète cannot move. Her mug is still on the floor in pieces. The eggs on her plate are untouched. She cannot move.

— It’s a long way to Okap from here, Celestine says. Do you know the way?

Dimanche shoots from his chair. We’ll have to stay off the main roads. They’ll be all over them.

— There’s a new road, Celestine says. Up the mountain. It goes all the way up.

— Byen, Dimanche says. He bolts upstairs.

Libète cannot move.

Celestine fills water bottles, orders Picot to throw together all the food he can.

She watches them rush about her. But her coffee. The mug. It spilled . . .

— Libète, get up and get your things. Dimanche’s order stirs her.

— Yes, she says. Yes.

— We have a long journey ahead. By foot, unfortunately.

She doesn’t know if she is up for it. As she climbs the stairs to her room, her eyes water. As she fills her red pack, those waters fall.

Within minutes she was back down. Dimanche and Celestine stood on the threshold of the yard and watched her come toward them.

Celestine looked to Dimanche as a father does his child. He clapped him on the back of the neck. He pulled Dimanche close, hugged him, whispered something in his ear. Dimanche stood limply, then hugged him back.

The pair left Menard on a trail to the east, through fields of cabbage. The ground started level and led to a grove that cast dappled shadows on the ground. She knew the mountains ahead meant their route would soon rise.

She spent a time thinking over his words.

He said they were gone.

From them, she pieced a story together.

He said they were all gone.

Her chest tightened.

Then he is a killer
.

— Tell me, Dimanche. If it’s a long road ahead. Please. Tell me all. To go from your village to being a policeman in Port-au-Prince? Leading some shadow life that saw you hunt these men along the way?

He walked ahead, not offering her a view of his face. Suddenly, he spoke.

— I got a ride with a group of American soldiers down the mountain. When their jeep reached Menard, I learned the paramilitaries had passed through the town. In all my life I had never even seen a town this size before. Pascal and the others fought the Americans there, those who had come after the coup. But those seven paramilitaries, they got away. I thought I was already at the end of my hunt. No money. No education. I was just an ignorant peasant. You heard it from Celestine, I’m sure. He took pity on me. Showed me kindness. Let me work his fields. In time, I became his lieutenant. In charge of his whole operation.

— How did you do it?

— I was
trè
konsantre
. Very focused. Quite solemn in those days.

— More than now?

— The years have softened me.

They walked in quiet. The Sun had broken through the cloudbanks, and the first wave of sweltering heat settled over the valley. They reached the forest, and Libète picked a fallen branch from the ground to occupy her hands.

— You stayed with Celestine for a long while?

— Just over two years.

— He lives so simply now. Hard to believe he owned so much.

— His fortunes changed with the country’s. You saw he was a bit scattered. Never had a head for business. Foreign rice flooded the land when trade barriers were lowered. That was a condition of President Aristide’s return to Haiti after he was ousted. Celestine’s family had farmed their own land for centuries, and
poof,
in a few years it was all but gone. I slowed the decline. But stopping it? Impossible.

— He didn’t seem destitute.

— His kids send him money from abroad. He could have left Haiti, even back then. He’s stubborn. To my knowledge he’s never left the country.

— Why did you leave Menard, then? Having it so well after losing so much? She poked him with her stick. I saw it myself, he loved–loves–you. Like a son.

— I’ve only been a son once, Dimanche snapped, then sighed. His home could only be a waystation, he said. While with him I learned math, learned to read, learned to manage. With proper feeding my body thickened. I was able to keep track of details others missed. I proved my worth. In time the notes I took from the dead man’s pocket came alive.

— What do you mean?

— Celestine helped me realize what they were. One was an address, in Port-au-Prince. As it turned out, one of his compatriot’s homes.

— He wanted you to hunt these men down?

Dimanche looked only at the road ahead. Of course not. After I felt like I had repaid my debt to him – Dimanche swept his hands one against the other – I left. To Port-au-Prince.

— And you joined the police.

— If I was found to have killed men while standing on one side of the law, I could be taken easily myself. So I chose the other side. I was assigned to Cité Soleil after having success elsewhere in Port-au-Prince. I took the post. What difference did it make? It was a dangerous assignment. But I had no family and didn’t care about the low pay. The hunt was the thing. Dimanche recalled it all with something like remorse.

— Seven men. Seven lives. She shook her head in horror. Her disappointment weighed on him, more than she knew.

— Not seven, he said. They spread out, but mostly stayed in Port-au-Prince. One was a cobbler. Another a shop owner. Another owned a café chain in Pétionville. One died in an auto accident. Another from a heart attack. One man even became a professor. All of them but one tried to live forgetful lives.

— So how many then? How many did you end?

— Four.

She threw her stick into the woods. But what of the law? Huh? The Dimanche I knew
worshipped
it.

— There is the law, and then there is justice. When the former denies the latter, justice must trump. He said it like a truism. Libète nearly launched into a sermon, parroting her old teacher Elize’s admonition: “God is judge. Leave violence to him.” She found her heart was not in the words. Maybe her belief was not.

— I tried to balance the scales. I killed, yes. I also fought the gangs. Kept innocents safe. Kept you safe!

She stared. I thought I knew you–not all the facts about you–but that I knew you.

He stopped, leaned back into a tree, and breathed deep to calm himself. I often feel the same way toward myself.

She couldn’t look at him. She could only think of the tally. He killed four. Two died from other circumstances.

— You accounted for six. What of the last?

Dimanche stood up straight. Hesitation clouded his features. His story, he said, is your story.

The Hotel Karibe is dark. It is an unbearable hour.

Providence brings him to this moment and this purpose. Of this, Dimanche is sure.

He has shaved for the occasion and is dressed in average clothes. He looks respectable, like any of the exclusive hotel’s guests. It had rained tonight, and his normally light guayavera stuck to his skin, but this distraction is no matter, not with what’s before him. He brushes his hand over the pistol stuffed in his waistband, tactile reassurance for the work ahead.

After he arrested Benoit at Libète’s leading, he was made to resign from the police. The only one who would have known of the bribe he accepted was Benoit, hence Benoit informed Dimanche’s superiors. Clearly Benoit’s part in the activity–being the source of the bribe–resulted in no prosecution, while Dimanche was out the door and on the street. Seventeen years’ service, amounting to nothing.

He had a bit of money saved–not much, but enough–and along with the bribe’s balance he was afforded the freedom to resume his hunt for Pascal. This pursuit had lain dormant ever since the earthquake.

The morsels of information he had gathered about Pascal over the years were few. One, the man used a number of false names and identities. These had thwarted Dimanche’s search time and again. Two, he maintained a low profile. And three, he was involved in some sort of wide-reaching criminal operation of recent provenance, the subsidiaries of which seemed to dabble in most every form of vice.

He began calling in favors all around Port-au-Prince in pursuit of further information. By roughing up a street thug he had been pointed toward a local pimp who had led him toward a crooked mayor who happened to have a pair of unhelpful habits–addictions to sex and cocaine. A fair amount of pressure applied to the mayor–literally, resulting in the man’s broken finger–led to a dockworker down at the city’s port who had directed the mayor to where he could purchase cocaine. This worker knew another stevedore who was siphoning from illegal shipments that passed through a local straw business’s storage containers. Dimanche relished this discovery: drugs were being stolen from the traffickers
by their own
. In and of itself, Dimanche didn’t expect this chain of inquiry to lead to Pascal and thought of tipping off the police–the good police–to every link along the chain. But there was something the first dockworker said that stopped him. One of the traffickers was sniffing around, and this enforcer wasn’t a low-level thug–he was reportedly older, well dressed, possibly senior. The volume of drugs purportedly being moved meant it had to be one of Haiti’s larger operations. This prompted Dimanche to wait and watch.

With help from the dockworker, Dimanche timed his visit when the enforcer was at the port. The man posed as a customs officer. He interviewed. Took names. Eventually made threats. Got a man fired. Dimanche soon heard the thief turned up dead, but that was not his concern, not anymore.

Dimanche had actually laid eyes upon the enforcer. He was beardless, and the man’s hair was peppered with white. He was of formidable size, though a gut slipped out and over his belt.

Trimming away the few decades of age, Dimanche was certain. He had found Pascal.

After the quake, the Hotel Karibe was one of Port-au-Prince’s few luxury hotels still operating. That one could walk through a tent camp and wade through such human misery to pull up to the hotel minutes later and wade in the hotel’s pool ate at Dimanche. And then there was the aimless nattering of the hotel’s patrons, their glasses always filled to the brim, their plates heaped high. When cholera ravaged the countryside and began working its way through the bowels of Port-au-Prince, the indifference of it all was simply too much.

On this night, when he reaches Pascal’s room, he pulls a magnetic key card from his pocket. It took a batch of half-baked lies with the concierge to get ahold of this prize.

The card slides through the door’s reader. Green.

He cracked the door. A light was on. He inclined his ear, checked for movement. Hearing none, he drew his gun and crept into the suite. Sweat prickled on his skin, despite the cool, cool air inside. He felt it pass over his bald head, blowing from a vent over the door and throughout the room.

He scanned the suite. There was a central room with two connected chambers. A sliding glass door looked out on the hotel’s palms and pool, a placid sheet of glass at this late hour. Not looking in front of him, he collided with an ottoman and cursed.

He was no spy, no expert in the clandestine. He had sat behind a desk much of his career, stood as a human barrier, interrogated the accused. He hated the character of a lurker slinking about under the cover of night. The justice he meted out shouldn’t have to hide. It should do its business boldly, under the noonday Sun.

He examined the surroundings more closely. Bottles of wine, a solitary glass. A blister pack of pills sat beside them, most of the foil pouches punched. Next to the center table were shoes kicked off and a jacket carelessly dropped to the floor. The room, pristine and luxurious, was hardly touched otherwise.