Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

I phone Sasha: “I think I was the last to see one of the little boys.” Then, I can’t help myself.

“Take it easy, Pat. Come, come...”

“I keep going over the moments and wondering what was in the frame which could tell me now that the man was or was not his father and if the little boy was at all anxious, resisting, being forced, some clue. I wish now it was not just the binoculars but the digital which I could have clicked away on and had the whole scene over and over to examine.” Sasha had given me the digital, bless him. “But as you know, not like me to have any of that ready. Not like me at all. I have just bought my first mobile, cell. As I said, I’m stuck in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

Patrice, it’s been days! Where’s my story?

Sasha, as soon as I‘ve got something you’ll be the first to know.

I lie.

p. s. I’m very close now.

He doesn’t reply. He’s getting impatient.

I was entertaining myself with the daily opera, Australian Open over, and checking the gate and the playground when the doorbell went. Wontons? I could do with a Carmella visit. Shitting birds? Leaking air conditioner? Not Savi, please. I turned the lock, slid back the emergency chain, opened the door. “Oh my god!” The man in front of me carried what seemed like an enormous machine gun pointed almost straight at me, but a little down to the ground when I looked again, catching my senses. I quickly wondered how he had gotten into the foyer. Then that thought slipped away.

“Good morning, sir,” he said.

“Morning, officers?” I presumed that was what they were. There were two of them, standing one behind the other outside the padlocked burglar proofing. They looked like commando fighters, not police officers. This could have been a scene in Gaza.

“We would like to come in,” the front one said.

“What’s this about?” I asked, reaching for the keys on the TV table, thinking this is quite extraordinary. And from somewhere, outrage, a feeling for my civil rights entered my head. I stopped reaching for the keys. “Have you got a warrant?”

“We don’t need a warrant, sir. We just want to talk to you. If you refuse we’ll go away and come back with a warrant and then it might be worse, you know.” He was losing his formality.

“You threatening me?”

“It won’t be threats, sir, if we have to go and get a warrant, but we probably won’t choose to do that. We can get through here quite easily, you know. Obstructing a police investigation does not improve your case.”

“Case? Which case? Is there a case? Talk to me from where you are, you don’t have to come in.”

“Hiding something?” Then this first police officer standing closer to the gate turned to his partner and said, “I wonder what they does have to hide. You have something you don’t want we to see? We not going to interfere with you, you know.” You know, you know, it was like a nervous tic with this one, and the other one was smiling constantly, leveling his gun at me from time to time, till he noticed, and then pointing it at the ground again.

“Maybe he want us to interfere with him.” The one at the back laughed and they both laughed now. “Look, open the focking gate, eh! Sir. Or is it madam? ”

I was terrified. The first one rattled the gate with the barrel of his gun.

“Open the focking gate, you buller man!”

I don’t know where I got the strength or the nerve. I slammed the front door shut, bolted it, and ran into my bedroom and shut that door too, imagining that I would have to lunge under the bed to escape the bullets ricocheting around the room. I had left the air conditioner on high and the room was as freezing cold as a morgue. I was terrified. I was sure they would blast themselves in. When that did not happen, I knew they would be back with the warrant. What could I do?

There was a gentle knock at the door after what seemed like an eternity of silence and the muffled passing of traffic on Saddle Road. I thought if I looked outside I would see that it was snowing. I was that dislocated. I felt lonely, realized how isolated I was without any family here now. How had those brutes gotten into the compound and then into the foyer? And why me? And my address? I squinted through the glass peephole and saw a distorted Carmella with a plate of steamed wontons. I opened up.

“What going on?” She was a ministering angel.

“I don’t know.”

She came inside and sat on the sofa, placing the plate of wontons on the coffee table. She was like a long lost friend. The smell of the wontons pervaded the room. They looked like slabs of white flesh.

“Here, have a shot of brandy.” Carmella extracted from nowhere a small silver flask. It was metallic cold. I unscrewed the top and tipped the flask to my lips. I noticed that she was wearing a beautiful red silk kimono dressing gown. I was revived by the medicinal brandy. Carmella must’ve been very beautiful in her youth, she was ageless. She still dyed her hair jet-black. She could’ve been fifty-five or eighty. Then she said gently, without alarm, “Now you see what the police are like here. Them is part of the problem. How them could catch bandits and kidnappers? Drink some more brandy. Eat a wonton.”

The brandy I sipped again, but the slabs of white flesh revolted me. Their spicy smell going quickly stale, the soya sauce sickly sweet.

“You have family, Patrice?”

“No, yes, all gone away. You know how it was? Black Power 1970. Parents bury in Lapeyrouse. Anyway... you know...”

“What you doing here then?”

“Love. Hug me island, hug me island.” I laughed.

“I see. You need somebody to help you, you know.”

Carmella advised me to call a lawyer. She got the phone number of one she had once used. “Her name is Jackie Sealy. And don’t worry with what them fellas tell you, eh, don’t worry with them, their mind sick, oui .” She must’ve been lovely as a young woman. I was reminded of The World of Suzie Wong .

When I asked her if she had noticed anything unusual, she just said she didn’t see too good. I didn’t want to quiz her, at least not at this moment. I was terrified. The police could return at any moment. I called Jackie Sealy. She said I should insist on a warrant and call her the moment they arrived and she would be over for the interview. “The way they threatened and insulted you is not on,” she said. There is goodness in the country, I thought.

As I waited for the police to arrive, it occurred to me that if someone had seen me looking through the binoculars at the school, they might well have reported me as a suspect. That thought made me sink deeper into the hammock. It was just that way the morning after I got here, when I had seen him arrive and depart and not thought anything of it — a little boy of ten or thereabouts getting into that Rover with a well-dressed gentleman who I thought must be his dad, or even a minister of government. No, they’re too smooth, dressed up in their big suits as if against the cold, and they go off in tinted cars which break the vehicle regulations. Anyway, black on black?

“What does that mean?” Sasha asked when he phoned. Trying not to worry him, I explained that people had theories that crime here was committed by black people on Indians. I told him I had no evidence of that. Did anyone? Evidence was not what people needed to believe something like that here, just a racist mind.

“Watch how you put any of that.”

When the police returned, they were quite different in manner. They had their warrant to search and interview. I told them I was instructed to call my lawyer and they accepted. My suspicion was that they were doing everything by the book because they really thought they were onto something, a serial pedophile, and if they messed up because of procedure they would have no case.