The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (62 page)

Awkwardly, because it was an afterthought, he asked their names. Margarete, she said,
and Henri. And yours,
monsieur
? Burnette.

We have to find you someplace to stay, he said.

He didn’t bother with the Christophe, which had for many months now been rewarded
by the international crisis with a hotelier’s windfall of no vacancies. Behind the
Christophe, up the slope of a wooded hill, was the only other respectable hotel in
Cap-Ha
ï
tien, the Mont Joli, but when he rolled into the Joli’s car park Margarete seemed
to shrink into her seat and her eyes darted across the scene—the hotel’s tropo-modern
multistoried facade of affluence, the swaggering flow of NGOs with their briefcases
and walkie-talkies, the landscaping of an off-limits world where the young woman and
the boy themselves would be considered trash—and she turned to him with a look of
frantic appeal that required no exchange of words and he said, Okay, I think I remember
seeing some places back on Route Nationale, and he whipped the CUCV around and drove
out toward the southern gate to the city where they found a depressingly seedy roadside
pensione, its run-down rooms exclusively for Haitians.
Bon,
she said apathetically,
no pwobwem,
but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her there with the child.

He drove back into the city, aimlessly cruising its stricken neighborhoods, until
ahead he saw the spire of a cathedral and eventually found its rectory attached to
the backside of its hulk, the stern glow of light in its windows like a warning against
intruding sinners. Let me ask here, he told the impassive Margarete. He went and rapped
on the wooden door and heard from within a faint but shrill command to advance and
so he advanced, stepping into the stark administrative space of Christ’s earthly accountants,
forced to smile because the brusque elderly woman behind the metal desk at the rear
of the rectory, the bishop’s secretary, reminded him of his own grandmother, a black-skinned
bewigged version of her stout, no-nonsense self, reading glasses tilted on her nose,
an earpiece mended with hospital tape. What is it,
monsieur
? asked the woman, scalding him from head to toe with her gaze, and he made a bumbling
attempt to explain himself before his French, and the explanation’s own logic, faltered.

Where are they? said the bishop’s secretary. I want to see them.

He brought them in and tried to listen to the conversation, but the streaming speed
of their language outran his comprehension. Okay, said the old bitch, switching to
English, letting her eyeglasses fall and hang, fixed to a cord around her neck. Her
face registered extreme doubt. You are keeping this woman,
monsieur
? she demanded.

Keeping?

I will not help you keep a woman for your own purpose.

It became clear to Burnette that the bishop’s secretary—dangling the prospect of a
solution before him, a recently vacated gardener’s bungalow on church property, three
month’s rent in advance and in dollars, daylight visitors only—was going to take Margarete
and her son and not give them back, for the sole purpose, not of altruism, but of
defeating the imperial white, the Pope himself meriting the same hostility from the
Haitian clergy and its die-hard Duvalieristes.

Dako,
madam, show us the house, please, he said, desperate to escape back to the Christophe,
and the old woman took a set of keys from her desk and a plastic flashlight and walked
them down past the cathedral to the next block to a two-room clapboard bungalow and
Burnette said to Margarete, Okay? and Margarete shrugged in agreement, Yes, why not.
He promised he would come back tomorrow with supplies and he turned to leave, rubbing
the head of the boy affectionately, when Margarete reached out to touch his arm and
said
Monsieur,
please, my brother, but he would not raise her hopes on that account.

As things went for the next two months, he would never have known his ass from a breakfast
biscuit if it hadn’t been for this unlikely relationship, the serendipitous triangle
between himself and Margarete and her sibling, their gratitude—fair enough—never forthcoming,
the emotion instead replaced by their discreet unsolicited loyalty.

One day she would tell him, Mr. Burnette, do you know who Jacques Lecoeur was? He
was what we call a
bayakou.

I don’t know that word, he said.

Bayakou.
In Haiti,
bayakou
is the laborer who comes at night to clean out the latrine.

When he returned to the UN compound in the morning he dropped by the medical tent
to check on the condition of the wounded. Two, including the gunshot girl, had been
medevaced to Port-au-Prince, sharing the helicopter with the body bags of Lecoeur
and his dead compatriots; the other two lay on gurneys, befuddled by painkillers and
the vagaries of misfortune. Ti Phillipe, he was astounded to discover, had been released
an hour earlier. Released? he asked the staff, no one saying much until he took aside
one of the Haitian orderlies. Why? To whom? The answers he received were confusing.
The police had taken Ti Phillipe with them. Which police? The national police. The
HNP? Yes. Did they arrest Phillipe? No, the commander took him away in his Toyota
HiLux. Which commander? The commander for Cap-Haïtien. Where were they going, do you
know? I don’t know,
monsieur,
but the commander was angry.

There was a standoff in progress when he arrived at the shipping containers, the UN’s
ad hoc penal colony, a half-dozen Haitian national police faced down by four Jamaican
International Police Monitors, everyone armed but not quite dangerous, the detainees
still locked in the oven, bellowing from inside and pounding on the metal walls. Both
sides took it for granted the white guy had come to settle the conflict in their favor.
The entire lot of them groused when he declared, I don’t know what the fuck is going
on here, but at least let those people out of there to get some fresh air until we
get Colonel Khan or someone over here to figure this thing out, his neutrality only
managing to combine each side’s contempt for the other into a shared contempt for
the interloper in the middle. Where’s your commander? he asked one of the Haitian
cops.

He is speaking with Khan.

What’s his name?

Major Depuys.

Speaking
was not the word he would have used to describe the interaction between the two commanders,
the Haitian and the Pakistani, when he heard them inside Khan’s office, Depuys shouting
in high-pitched French, Khan responding in French himself but only to an interpreter
in the room who parroted the colonel’s supercilious tone. His entry into the fray
had been denied by Khan’s deputy, who asked him to please take a seat and wait. What’s
happening? he asked, and the deputy told him a newly commissioned police chief for
Cap-Haïtien had arrived from Port-au-Prince bearing a militant jurisdictional grudge.
Minutes later the door banged open and there was Khan, ushering out an enraged Major
Dupuys, a tall lean man in an all-black uniform and a black baseball cap embroidered
with gold letters, HNP.

Ah, Captain Burnette, said the colonel in English. Just the man I need. I want you
to supervise the transfer of the detainees to Major Dupuys’s prison, where they are
to remain incarcerated—and Captain, I hold you, not the major, accountable for this—until
I receive further instruction from Port-au-Prince. Understood?

Yes, sir.

Very well. Get this foolish man out of my sight. He is giving me a headache.

The issue, the contentious heart of Major Dupuys’s grievance, was neither small nor
inconsequential and it stripped away the illusion of his nation’s fragile sovereignty
and the restoration of that sovereignty by the powers invested in the mission. It
took Burnette all day to begin to grasp the situation, and another week to pry out
the nefarious details. Essentially, the government of Haiti had never authorized Khan’s
excursion into the mountains to take down Lecoeur and his men, although the palace
seemed to have consented to a vaguely outlined operation to contact and assess the
current status and activity of the evasive band of guerillas. When word of Khan’s
bloody raid on Lecoeur reached the national palace, the government’s reaction was
as you might expect—outraged impotence, hollow threats, a formal protest to the United
Nations Peacekeeping directorate, a clamor for the dismissal and deportation of the
Pakistani colonel, a demand that the bodies of the slain be delivered to Port-au-Prince
and the immediate and unconditional release of the incarcerated, a demand that the
colonel finessed by remanding the detainees into the custody of his American advisor
until further notice. Maybe somebody at UN HQ in Port-au-Prince wanted the prisoners
sent down to the capital for further questioning. Maybe not. The conflict took days
to resolve. Meanwhile, Lecoeur was given a state funeral at the National Cathedral,
eulogized by the president as a freedom fighter and a martyr and interred in an already
crammed mausoleum, the country’s pantheon for assassinated and butchered heroes.

Seize the narrative. Cue the riots. He could feel the ground rumble under his feet
and knew nothing here was bound to improve.

For Burnette, the story never really got any better. Work with me on this, he told
Major Depuys that morning as they walked to their vehicles. I don’t like it any more
than you do. But he would learn this lesson again and again—mistrust was organic;
trust itself Sisyphean. Waiting in the cab of the major’s white pickup truck was Ti
Phillipe, an immaculate bandage circling his neck like a priest’s collar.
Como ye?
he asked Lecoeur’s lieutenant.
Feck you,
Ti Phillipe said in garbled English, the clenched face, the black gleam of hatred
in his eyes, making the curse superfluous. Burnette pulled the major aside. Okay,
we need to talk. Phillipe was what?—a free man or the same as the other detainees?
Major Dupuys had his own question.

You were there in the mountains. Why did the soldiers massacre these people?

No, that’s not correct. I wasn’t there.

You were there. You attacked this man.

No, I saved his life. We left before the soldiers came.

Why did they attack Jacques Lecoeur?

Honestly, major, I don’t know. I just know that it was the wrong thing to do.

This colonel was doing the dirty work for the big
macoute
families.

Maybe that’s the reason. I don’t know.

It would be some days later when he sat down in the UN canteen across from one of
the Canadian pilots who had flown in the operation and heard a far simpler explanation
that chilled him with its credibility. Anyone with a headset on, and that of course
meant Khan as well as the flight crews, had listened in as Burnette radioed from the
ground for a medical evacuation. The quality of the transmission, as was frequently
the case, was poor, interrupted by static, open to interpretation. Khan’s voice entered
the commo, asking the American for clarification—Have shots been fired? How many wounded?
You never responded, the pilot reminded Burnette. Were you receiving? No, said Burnette,
trying to remember if he had that right. Well, you can guess what happened next, said
the pilot. Khan got on the intercom and told his troops to lock and load. He told
them the LZ was hostile, they were coming in hot. We were still out a ways, but when
we put down a half hour later, the fucking Pakis were squirting rounds as they came
off the ramp. One of those things, right, said the pilot, reacting to the crestfallen
look on Burnette’s face. Look on the bright side, Captain.

The bright side, Burnette said. That would be?

We’re in Haiti. The Big Stinky, eh? Cheer up. It doesn’t count.

To ease the tension, he let Major Dupuys dissuade him from going back into Khan’s
office to get it straight about what to do with Ti Phillipe. They requisitioned a
pair of Humvees from the motor pool and enlisted Paki drivers and returned to the
cargo containers and Burnette explained the transfer to the Jamaicans, who took the
occasion to recompose themselves into bureaucrats. Let’s see de paper, mahn. The prisoners
broiled for another hour while Burnette returned to Kahn’s office for a written order
and Dupuys tracked down the IPM captain to obtain a copy of the roster of the detainees.
Finally the door was opened, men stumbled into the sunlight, Burnette intervening
when the Jamaicans lurched forward. Put the cuffs away, he said. Step aside, goddamn
it. Call the roll. When Margarete’s brother answered to his name, Burnette removed
him from the group. Major Dupuys, he said, this man will ride with me. You guys are
dismissed, he said to the Jamaicans. The detainees were packed into the open beds
of the Humvees, the HNP climbed into the back of Dupuys’s pickup, Burnette coaxed
the reluctant brother, wary of being singled out, into the CUCV and they convoyed
out of the UN compound, halting for fifteen minutes at the line of port-a-johns.

You are Reginald,
oui?
I’m Captain Burnette.

I remember you. From the mountains.

He wanted to explain himself, to apologize, but it was too soon—it felt that way at
least, too soon to warrant the brother’s trust, too soon to know what further trouble
might insert itself between them in the coming days, and so he contained himself,
offering nothing more than the one piece of information that could matter, that he
was helping Reginald’s sister and nephew and would try to arrange a visit. He glanced
over to see the man’s rearrangement of fear and suspicion into baleful mystification,
Reginald finally lifting and tilting his head to look at him, study him, calculating
an array of possible motives or possible deceits, trying to understand the white man’s
own face and expression but understanding nothing and asking, as his sister had asked,
the question for which Burnette had no answer and many answers,
Why?
But the question was starting to bug him and his brain, held captive by the warden
of a foreign language, had begun to fry.