Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Terry parked out in front of the local police station, where the chef was a little guy with glasses covered in a film of dust and the apologetic air of a disorderly professor, as if he had expected the blan tomorrow or the day after that, or was it yesterday.

The chef rose with a start when they came in; then, gathering his wits about him, he extended a long, strong hand. The other PNH was unshaved, fat, chewing on his own tongue as if it were a piece of gum. Now he was sitting on a three-legged stool, trying to balance with only moderate success on just two legs while Terry inspected the register.

The names of the suspects and their crimes were written in beautiful cursive, like the names on the Declaration of Independence. The PNH are supposed to write down everybody they arrest and everybody they let go. You subtract the latter from the former, and the remainder should be rotting away in the dank, dark cell. It’s not tricky, Terry figured. It really wasn’t. He looked at the register, and he looked at it twice.

“Where is Neolién Joassaint?” he said.

They booked him in two weeks ago, still haven’t let him go, still haven’t charged him with a crime, still haven’t transported him to the prison in Jérémie. But he wasn’t in the cell either — Terry looked. In theory, that’s extrajudicial detainment.

“Neolién Joassaint?”

“Here,” Terry said. “Look. He’s on your books.”

The chef looked at the other guy. The other guy looked at the chef .

“The juge de paix ordered him released,” the chef finally decided.

Now, this is a pretty darned important detail. You take a prisoner into your custody, you should write down when you let him out. If you don’t do that, he takes off for the hills, how do you know the PNH didn’t bury him out back of the station? What they were trying to build in Haiti was a system of justice, effective bureaucratic procedures with checks and balances, allowing the police, on the one hand, to maintain public order and safety, but allowing the public, on the other hand, to audit the work of the PNH. Neither dictatorship nor anarchy.

“Did he sign the thing for his liberation?” Terry not remembering the word for “receipt.”

“Of course!”

“Can you show it to me?”

The chef let out an exasperated sigh. He pulled the whole drawer out of his desk, overturned a massive pile of papers on the floor, papers going back decades, little red bugs scurrying from the light. He started looking through the papers one by one, squinting at each.

Terry went out for a smoke with Beyala while he looked.

“It is not like this in my country,” Beyala said.

“Bullshit,” Terry said.

Terry had been on patrol with police from a dozen countries, and everybody said their country was better than Haiti. If you listened to the Africans, you’d think Cameroon, Tanzania, Niger, and Benin were little Switzerlands, they were so efficient; the people were so honest; the ladies so fat and lovely. Sri Lanka was swell. No place beat Nepal. The Philippines were fantastic. Only Haiti sucked.

Twenty minutes later the chef still couldn’t find the receipt. No one had a clue whether the PNH beat the guy to death and buried him, or whether he escaped and they were too embarrassed to mention it, or whether he was released legitimately.

Terry wrote all this down in his notebook. That’s all he was expected to do: take notes. That’s all he had the power to do.

Thus he had monitored.

Next came “mentoring.”

That’s when Beyala suggested that they buy some envelopes, organize the receipts by month. The chef put his lips together, then inhaled through his nose. He shook his head sadly.

“Unfortunately, we do not have the means to acquire office supplies,” he said.

The words “office supplies” sounded soft and effete in his mouth.

“Haiti is a very poor country,” he added.

The way Terry saw it, poverty was like a fast-running river sweeping every Haitian and his responsibilities downstream. The poverty of the nation excused every personal fault. C’est pas faute mwem , the Haitians said: It’s not my fault.

Beyala looked stern. “In my country, if we have no money to buy envelopes, we use our personal funds,” he said. “We care about our job. For us, it is a pleasure to do one’s duty.”

The chef nodded, as if he had absorbed an important lesson. Pleasure equals duty.

Then Beyala lectured on handcuffs and their proper use. The UNPOLs were supposed to give a little speech to the locals about some aspect of good policing. Somebody gave the UNPOLs the lesson in their Sunday meeting, then they spread the gospel all week long. This week it was handcuffs. Last week it was the role of the juge de paix . The week before that it was arrest warrants. The guy chewing his tongue on the stool zoned out. His eyes went glassy — no exaggeration, like he had a 103-degree fever. The chef nodded his head seriously.

“The handcuff, what is it?” Beyala began. “It is a tool for the control of the prisoner. When the prisoner is handcuffed, he is in your charge and entirely your responsibility. What are the three circumstances under which the handcuff is to be employed? Alors …”

Long silence sometime thereafter indicated to all present that Beyala was done.

They have mentored.

Now it was time to “support.”

Out came the prisoners. An old guy, a young guy, both handcuffed with the plastic flexi-cuffs the UN gave the PNH. (“The prisoner may be restrained only when the liberty of his or her hands might constitute a menace to the security of others…”) They looked docile enough, but the young one was accused of threatening to kill his uncle in a beef over a pig. The old one had gone and rooted around in some other guy’s field like a wild boar — he was charged with dévastation de champs. No one knew why; in Haiti, no one ever knew why. The old one looked guilty, like a dog with his head in the garbage.

The fat PNH stopped chewing on his tongue.

“Au revoir, Messieurs!” he said to the prisoners. “You are going to travel today like a pair of princes!”

When they finally got back to the commissariat, the PNH took the prisoners inside, where they passed out of Terry’s life forever.

They have supported.

* * *

During Terry’s first few months in Jérémie, a couple of other plum posts on the org chart came open. There was the coordinateur . Reporting and Planning. Mentoring Support. Admin, Logistic, and Personnel. The guys who did riot prevention. There were maybe three dozen cars in the whole Grand’Anse — and even Traffic would have been a step up. Guys who had less experience than he had, guys who didn’t even know how to turn on a computer, were getting those jobs. Traffic went to that little Indian guy, Sunderdarbashan, who was best friends with Marguerite Laurent; when Marguerite Laurent saw him, she wrapped her arm around him and said, “Go get ’em, buddy.” That kind of shit drove Terry crazy. He didn’t think that was how an office should be run, on the basis of whether Marguerite Laurent thinks you’re a cutie-pie.

After the Sunderdarbashan incident, Terry got into it with Marguerite Laurent.

“What is it going to take for me to get treated with some respect around here?” he said.

Terry could be a forceful guy, and the way he said it, in retrospect, was maybe a little heavy-handed, like he was trying to intimidate her.

She was right back in his face. “Terry, what you need to do here is relax.”

Terry was getting a little obsessive about things — he admitted it later, just that word. The house he was staying in out on the Route Nationale was like a hot concrete box at night. His Jordanian housemate spent all night watching bondage porn, and all night long Terry heard women begging and pleading, “Please, no, please.” Terry’s back would be killing him on his cheap cotton mattress, so he couldn’t sleep.