Lost Girls (20 page)

The truck passed beneath other trees, straw haversacks of rotting fruit, empty bottles of rum, hardened sugar candies, pieces of colorful cloth, seashells, and pictures of saints and past presidents pasted on cardboard.

“And what can she do when she touches the dead?” Hettie tried not to sound curious.

“She knows what they are thinking.”

“She talks to them?”

Etienne shrugged. “She holds their hand, he told Mrs. Lambert. He said she is blind.”

“Blind,” Hettie whispered, immediately thinking of Tam-Tam Boy, who also held hands.

Etienne nodded. “Crazy, huh? What if she is coming to see Pioche?”

“Etienne,” Hettie said, shocked, “why would you say that?”

Etienne shrugged. “She is coming to Tiburon, Mrs. Lambert said. It is what was written on the customs form.”

Hettie’s heart skipped a beat.

Near the craggy summit of Morne Mansinte, the road snaked away from the sea, skirting boulders through hollows of dense jungle growth and saplings growing out of the stumps of felled trees. The road beneath the shantytown was wide enough for a single car, so Etienne had to pass the path leading up to it and park near the gates to the parish cemetery.

It was a lesson of the Caribbean ancestors that the dead were as vulnerable to hurricanes as the living. No one wanted their family’s bones washed to sea with the bones of pigs and goats, so cemeteries were placed in the cradles of mountains.

Etienne looked at the crude gates to the cemetery. Few visited the bodies within, caring less that the graves were attended than that the bodies remain behind the magic of the black cross and beneath the earth where they belonged.

Pioche would have had none of this, but Hettie still believed. The soul spent a year and a day in dark waters, then it could be reclaimed by ritual—at a price—by the houngan and put in a bottle called a govi. Later, if she wished, she could release Pioche to join the ancestors in the cosmos, as the bones and flesh were now released to occupy the natural world, roots and rocks and rivers.

The obligation to a soul was a serious undertaking in voudon. Souls left to wander the earth might bring illness and disaster to a family. The struggle for Pioche’s soul to rest would be over in days; he would be able to pass by the crossroads and Hettie could begin to prepare for the day when she would purchase Pioche’s soul and release Yousy from this place forever.

They walked along the road to a well-worn path, climbing the hillside to the outlines of shanties.

Hettie could smell boiled meat and the decay of rotting carcasses. There would be two sacrifices at Pioche’s service tonight, both a chicken and a goat she had bought as offerings to the spirit of Papa Ghede. But Pioche was not the houngan’s only concern this day. The parishioners of another village were here; a small crowd had already gathered around the temple.

The temple—hounfor—was decorated with flags of red, yellow, and green. A bucket of pink water sat at the edge of the pavilion, which was open on two sides but covered with a thatched roof. A toy plastic boat hung from the ceiling. Someone had put the torn vinyl seats of a car in one corner and a stand-alone ashtray stood before them. Drummers in red shirts and blue jeans and hounsis in white dresses circled a boy on the floor. Hettie and Etienne joined the villagers from Morne Epine, who watched as Tam-Tam Boy pulled a corncob plug from the neck of a decapitated chicken and sprinkled blood over the feet of a crippled boy, which had been tied together with black ribbon. A moment later Tam-Tam Boy knelt in front of the boy; arm extended, searching for his head until he found it and drinking from a bottle of rum, he stared at the roof with his milky white eyes and then leaned down to face the boy and spit the rum upon his face.

Hettie backed away, leaving Etienne with the gathering, and retreated to the clearing’s edge, where Pioche lay in his open coffin. He didn’t look or smell so much like Pioche anymore, was already beginning to leave this world, she thought. His hair was collecting dirt and loose grass, his skin bloated and stained with paint and blood and the houngan’s magic oils meant to keep the bocor away. She looked at the hole in his stomach that had leaked his intestines into the street for all in the village to see.

She was worried about the white mambo Mrs. Lambert’s son had said entered the country. Her whole life had changed in the course of a week because Pioche had seen something he should not have, because Pioche’s heart was too big to turn his head away and to mind what business was his own.

Was it only coincidence a white mambo would be coming to Tiburon harbor?

She thought about Yousy. Yousy had always preferred the company of Linda, the World Freedom worker from America, to the children of her own village, and reading to hide-and-seek, or listening to English radio stations instead of playing kickball on the beach.

Hettie remembered the night Pioche told her what he had seen in a cellar where he was drilling to place explosives. Yousy was playing her radio that night, her music filling the small house and out the back windows; they’d whispered on the terrace, except that when they got up to go back inside, Yousy was not there. Not lying by her radio.

Pioche had run outside and found her sitting on the beach in the dark, just beyond the terrace where they had been talking. He’d wanted to admonish her for spying on them, but when he asked her if she heard them talking she had said not. Hettie knew he wasn’t sure. Hettie knew that he was worried about what Yousy might have heard.

And now that Hettie had heard the story about the uniformed men in jeeps she was worried, too, about something that had been bothering her since the day Pioche’s body was found.

Why had Yousy’s American friend Linda been so insistent about where Pioche had been working?

Had Yousy overheard Pioche’s story after all?

Had Yousy placed them in danger without knowing it?

Graham paced his office in Langley, Virginia, as a phone rang in Lyon, France. He snatched it off the cradle.

“Helmut?”

“What have you got?”

“One of the ships in Gdansk when Warrant Officer Aleksandra Goralski went missing belonged to Jean Jasmine’s fleet. DEA boarded it a couple of years ago in Caracas when he went down for distributing cocaine. It was later sold to a straw corporation, but DEA says it was definitely Jean Bedard’s and Jean Bedard had ties to the Mendoza cartel.”

“How did Bedard operate?”

“He exported goods from Central and South America, stuff like bauxite, soybeans, and mahogany, also his own produce and coffee from Haiti.”

“Going to?”

“Mainly Bulgaria and Russia on the Black Sea. He brings back farm tractors, small engine parts, and appliances.”

“Which translates to drugs trafficked east and women trafficked west,” Dantzler said.

“And everything hubbed out of Haiti to places like South and Central America,” Graham added.

“Which fits the Bulgarian’s story last year. Women imported to South America from ports on the Black Sea. Bedard was the Tonton Macoute commander, right?”

“The same. I got aerials of his compounds in Colombia and Haiti, but it’s this second one that’s interesting, Helmut. It’s in the mountains of de Cartache, in jungle about thirty kilometers north of Tiburon harbor. The ruins of an old cathedral converted to a mansion, but it’s got these balustrades. It looks like a fucking castle, Helmut.”

“Lord Jesus, what have we done? Have you raised the colonel yet?”

“I’ve been calling him for an hour and still nothing. I got a security officer from the embassy to try to find him through local channels. There is no one at his home or office. The police weren’t very helpful; they say that colonels make their own schedules.”

“What’s your take?”

“He may have been compromised.”

“My God,” Dantzler said. “How did we manage to let civilians into Haiti? Does this castle or whatever look active?”

“It’s active. Security fencing, vehicles on the property, there’s a helipad on the lawn.”

“Why hire a blast engineer? You see any new construction going on, forest being cleared?”

“None, but the original cathedral is historically documented. It was built above a marble quarry used to construct the interior in the 1700s. The whole side of the mountain is hollow under it.”

“He’s getting ready to bring it down.”

“It’s all we can guess.”

“Then we have a time issue, too. Can you get Ambassador Sanderson to the palace?”

“Already made the call. I’m expecting her any moment.”

“She’s not going to be happy we have people in Haiti.”

“Christ’s sake, Helmut, they’re not ours. Tourists go there every day.”

“Yes, tourists, and one would question their judgment, too, but I don’t think Carol Bishop and a psychic investigator will qualify as tourists. You’re going to have to tell the ambassador about Jill Bishop and how she was found and why Carol and Sherry are in Haiti. Ambassador Sanderson has got to convince President Préval to send troops to Bedard’s compound and now.”

“Well, if you can possibly imagine how little I look forward to that conversation, imagine how well Garland Brigham’s going to take it when I tell him we can’t reach the escort.”

Sherry had checked in with him just before leaving Pétionville, a little over thirty minutes ago. Ten minutes later Graham called to say Interpol had not been able to reach Colonel Deaken for the last two hours and that a structure like the one Sherry Moore had described in both Denali and Jamaica had been located less than twenty miles from Tiburon. It was owned by a former commander of Papa Doc’s secret police.

Brigham, furious, had had the bad feeling ever since. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened when people went off half-cocked. How could they be so stupid, inserting civilians into hostile territory with an unknown entity for support? How could he have witnessed it all himself and done nothing? Was he getting senile, for Christ’s sake? And Sherry, how stubborn she could be while leading him around by the nose; support me, support me, she liked to say. Civilians, he thought. Fucking civilians.

He was just about to dial her number when his phone rang. Once. No more. He looked at the number on the screen, then at his watch, feeling his heart pound in his chest. He crossed the hotel’s terrace to a deserted balcony and dialed a number. It was 7:12
P.M
. There were five more hours before she reached Tiburon. If she reached Tiburon.

Beyond the jagged coastline overlooking highway A-1, a beautiful wooden schooner glided toward Port Antonio; she had three sails and towed a rubber skiff in her wake.

“George,” the inspector answered.

“Something’s happened. They’re in trouble. Your boat is fueled?”

“Use the hotel’s courtesy van. Two miles down the road to Frenchman’s Cove, the Bertram sportfisherman, she’s named
Zuben’Ubi
, you can’t miss her. But I’m still forty minutes away.”

“I’ll need it,” Brigham growled. “I have calls to make.”

The men had talked after the women boarded their flight to the Dominican Republic yesterday afternoon. They talked about boats—Rolly King George was terribly impressed when he learned that Brigham was a retired admiral—and they talked about politics and the dangers for women going into Haiti alone. Brigham had told Rolly King George about the signal he had arranged with Sherry Moore. They agreed that if anything were to happen, they would never be able to fly into Haiti and reach Tiburon in time, even if they could get past customs and God knows what else lay in store. But Tiburon harbor was on the near western coast of the island, only three hours by sea. If they could get to Tiburon harbor, Brigham had told the inspector, the Bertram sportfisherman was large enough to accommodate the second part of Brigham’s plan.

Sherry’s unease about the colonel continued to build after he insisted on taking their cell phones. She wasn’t completely convinced they were in trouble, but Brigham had been adamant about erring on the side of caution. She had dialed his number and let it connect on her lap behind the driver’s seat before she hung up and turned the phone over to Colonel Deaken. She had no idea what Brigham could do if she was in trouble, probably there was little more he could do than call the American embassy, which would cause a lot of political consternation over Carol Bishop’s being in Haiti.

In retrospect, they should have come to Haiti alone. She should have told no one what she was doing. She could have hired a car to take her to Tiburon and back. She could have tried to reason with the dead man’s family on her own; someone in Tiburon had to speak English. Someone had to be willing to help her.

“What do you see?” Sherry asked.

Carol looked silently out the window. They crossed an arched bridge; a boy was wading through water, hands full of net, a rope to a wooden rowboat clenched between his teeth. Several middle-aged men wearing only shorts sat on the bank smoking cigarettes and drinking rum, pointing at the boat, telling the boy what to do.

“There are buses and pickup trucks with canopies over benches bolted to the bed; they are taxis, but the people call them tap-taps. When you want to get off you tap against the side of the truck,” Carol explained. “We are behind one now, a bus painted red and yellow—someone sprayed graffiti across the side.”

“What does it say?”

“
Bondye si bon,
God is so good.”

“There are houses?”

“They are plastered and mostly windowless. There is a white man painting a garage full of chairs, missionaries. You smell the market?”

Sherry smiled and nodded. It was impossible not to smell the market.

“There are murals on the walls. Haitians like color, yes, Colonel?”

The colonel nodded mechanically.

“A procession of women in light-colored dresses, something religious, no doubt, everything in Haiti is religious. There is a fire ahead.” Carol leaned forward, craning her neck to see from the opposite window. “An old car and tires, smell the rubber? The smoke is black. Some men are chasing a dog with a stick.”

It took four hours to reach the town of Port-à-Piment. They passed marshes that reeked of methane gas, rolling brown hills that looked like the badlands of the American Midwest. There were treeless plains and standing green water swarming with clouds of black mosquitoes.

The doors of the homes in Port-à-Piment were splintered by hammers and boots from police raids long past. Bullet-pocked walls were crumbling to reveal magazines and old newspapers used to form the plaster. The stench of human waste in the open gutters followed them everywhere. Houses in the southern peninsula had twice been underwater from Hurricanes Noel and Dean; the sewers ran free and wells would have been contaminated.

Carol Bishop sat next to Sherry, wondering if Jill had been on this very road. It was quite likely, she thought, there were only two main roads that extended to the ends of the island, one north and one south.

She remembered Jill as a tiny girl on her lap in the nursery of their home in Chicago. She remembered a girl in pigtails on a porch swing, on a log tube in Disney World, holding her hand at her grandmother’s funeral.

Out the window she saw a smiling girl in a filthy dress playing with a hula hoop and two boys swatting with sticks at the roof of a car buried in the mud. Others only stared at the traffic, taking particular interest in the white women in the jeep going by.

Port-à-Piment had more than its share of ramshackle churches and missionaries. Old men stood in the doorways talking to old women with wet eyes. There were tents and signs and crosses planted everywhere. All the world’s religions seemed intent on converting the destitute population, and indeed the people of Haiti were transformed to Catholics and Baptists and Mormons for a day. They got their candy bars and hot dogs and marshmallows, sometimes clothing from collection boxes around the world. But when the sun began to set they were voudons once more. Voodoo was the only constant in their lives. Only voodoo had never criticized or subjugated or abandoned them.

“Incredible,” Carol Bishop said.

“Haiti?” Sherry asked.

“It’s utterly sad.”

“We will fuel in Port-à-Piment if either of you needs to relieve yourself,” the colonel said.

The streets were quiet under a three-quarter moon, trees wilted from the scorching afternoon. They passed between blue and yellow homes, watched by big eyes behind small hands that were curled over banisters of second-story porches. Stray dogs roamed deserted streets; the smell of the sea was heavy with fish.

They stopped at an old Texaco station and saw a military truck parked off to one side. The bed of the truck was crowded with solemn-looking men wearing black. Two of them were inside the garage.

The last stretch of highway to Tiburon hugged the rugged coastline. To their north was a rock wall that formed Morne Mansinte, to their south the glassy black surface of a moon-splashed sea. There was no traffic on the road in either direction, but Carol Bishop kept turning to look over her shoulder. The truck full of men bothered her. They weren’t policemen, she knew. Was she mistaken or had the colonel nodded to one of them while he was fueling the jeep?

An hour later they were there, the breathtaking harbor, a field of stars that stretched from mountain to sea. Carol described the moonlight ripples, the masts of small wooden boats gently rocking in the surf. The village was dark and shaggy with thatched roofs. Torches flickered at the water’s edge as fishermen speared pan fish.

The jeep turned into the village, its headlights lacerating the serenity. The colonel braked at the end of a street, jumped from the vehicle, and began to hammer on doors. Candles were lit behind curtains. A few electric lights came on. Sherry could hear unintelligible voices, the colonel’s loud rebukes.

After almost twenty minutes passed, the colonel marched back out of the shadows, pulling himself behind the wheel, and jerked the jeep irately through a three-point turn to head back to the main road, where they continued west half a mile and turned up the side of the mountain.

He was out of character, Sherry thought. His impatience seemed less about helping them to locate the family than apprehension. He did not seem like a man in control.

The sea quickly fell away behind them, headlights wavering between the mountainside and a black bottomless void to their right.

Carol looked back once more in the direction of the coast and this time saw the pair of tiny headlights eight or ten miles behind. Someone was coming from the direction of Port-à-Piment, where they had just fueled.

“They are at the dead man’s cleansing,” Colonel Deaken said into his rearview mirror. “The houngan’s temple is behind a cemetery on the mountain. We will be there any minute.”

The sparse lights of Tiburon on the coast were dizzying from the height of Carol’s passenger window. The road had many switchbacks and blind curves. It climbed through wisps of fog to an eerie, treeless summit. Sharp silhouettes of the jagged rocks poked through, pockets of lingering condensation.

A large black cross appeared before them, posted between squat thorny trees. Horned skulls hung from the bare branches.

“What are they?” Sherry heard Carol ask.

“Goat heads,” the colonel interjected.

“Their skulls, they are hanging from the trees,” Carol explained to Sherry.

The rotted wooden gate of a cemetery came up on their left. There was an arch over it and crude tombstones and crooked stick crosses behind. On a hill behind the cemetery was the silhouette of a shantytown. Behind the ramshackle buildings was the orange glow of a fire. Smoke on the fog was bitter and acrid. The sound of drums permeated the night.

Half a dozen battered cars were parked in a clearing.

“We will have to walk in from here,” the colonel said, swinging the jeep around and parking next to them. “There is a path over there.” He pointed in the direction of his headlights before he turned off the igntion.

An old woman walked out of the darkness. She was holding a smoldering cigarette in a hand with two fingers. She looked at them a moment, then started down the road, vanishing into the night.

Sherry exited the vehicle and Carol took her arm.

They followed the colonel to the path and climbed it toward the shanties. The drums beat steadily in the distance, Sherry could make out voices now.

There were coffins leaning against one of the shanties, one painted black was five feet tall, the other no larger than a baby.

“I can see it now. The temple,” Carol told Sherry. “It’s a wooden structure, but there are only three walls. There is a pole in the center of the floor, people are sitting outside on the dirt looking in. There is a body on the floor, a man’s body, and he is naked but for underwear. An old man is kneeling in front of him. He is wearing blue jeans and a red shirt. He has a red kerchief around his neck.”

The drums stopped. The people turned to look at them, a few wandering away, escaping into the shadows.

“Tell me more,” Sherry urged.

“The walls of the temple are painted light blue like a robin’s egg, there are murals drawn on the walls, a large black eye looking down from the heavens, a child wearing a crown, fish, and colorful dancers. There is a big black man with no face who holds the earth in his hands. There are flags everywhere, colored patches of cloth tied to the trees, to the posts and frame of the building, all different, some green, some red, some yellow.”

“Who is this man?” the colonel barked, the heels of his boots striking hard across the wooden floor of the temple.

“Pioche,” the old houngan answered. “His wife”—he introduced a heavy-set woman sitting next to him—“and his daughter; and who are you?”

“Colonel Deaken, Police National,” he retorted.

“It’s him,” Sherry whispered. “Pioche.”

Carol squeezed Sherry’s hand, biting back tears.

“We must be careful, do you understand? We don’t want to scare them.”

“Yes,” Carol answered. She understood well.

“I’ve brought someone to look at this body. It is police business,” the colonel barked. “Move away.”

“Let him stay,” Sherry interfered. “I want him to help me.”

There was a moment of silence, the colonel shrugged as if indifferent, then turned and marched away.

“He’s blind,” Carol said in awe. “The old man. He can’t see.”

“That should make it easy.” Sherry smiled and squeezed her hand.