Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Had Terry’s phone not rung, the two of them might have continued to fight all through the evening. Even as they prepared dinner, they would have fought: the two of them were entirely capable of discussing whether the pasta was ready, whether the wine was sufficiently chilled, and what time her flight left the next morning in tones an outsider might have considered perfectly amicable, even as another conversation was conducted between them, no words employed, that was cruel and biting and true. The fight might well have lasted until that moment when Kay set foot on her plane back to Port-au-Prince and Miami, the whole otherwise lovely visit clouded by a sense of disgruntlement and marital unease, despite the fact that neither Terry nor Kay had said out loud so much as a single bitter word.

But at that moment Terry’s phone rang. He had the phone chiefly to communicate with Kay herself. It might have been the first time since she arrived that she heard its shrill ringtone. She startled slightly.

“Talk to me, brother,” Terry said.

Then Terry was moving quickly, listening and standing up at the same time, holstering his pistol. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. “Get under the bed and stay away from the windows. Don’t go outside. I’m on my way.”

He slipped the phone into his pocket.

“Who’s that?” Kay asked.

“I’ve got to go.”

Kay could tell from the cast of his face that whatever was happening was serious. Something she knew about Terry, something she liked very much, was that he was extremely competent in an emergency. She trusted absolutely his judgment on important matters, matters of life and death: she knew in these moments not to interfere or question him. Then she could hear the siren of his patrol car screaming. She sat alone in the early-evening darkness, wondering what she would do if he never came home.

* * *

Terry first met Johel Célestin at Mission HQ when Johel came to give the UNPOLs a presentation on the situation in Les Irois. Presentations like the judge’s were a regular feature of UNPOL life, some speaker from Port-au-Prince or per diem king droning on monotonously for an hour or two about arrest warrants or the responsibilities of the local justice of the peace.

But Johel was a lively speaker. Terry admired a good orator, even if the oration was just a PowerPoint slideshow for a couple dozen UNPOLs. He appreciated that Johel switched between English and French, making sure that everyone in the room followed the complicated legal and political details. Moreover, Johel was passionate about his subject. Terry had been surprised how many people associated with the Mission, both Haitian and foreigner, seemed to speak from some dead-souled place of extreme boredom and cynicism. But Terry could see from the judge’s animated face and sharp eyes that the situation in Les Irois was keeping him up nights.

The dossier Johel discussed with the UNPOLs dealt with a recent spate of civil unrest in the small seaside town of Les Irois. The mayor of Les Irois, Maximilien “Fanfan” Dorsainville, had for many years enjoyed an intense and combative rivalry with another local politician, a fellow by the name of Hyppolite Aurélienne. Despite their differences, Mayor Fanfan and Député Aurélienne had maintained an uneasy truce, until sometime shortly after the most recent election, when Député Aurélienne achieved for his district a legislative coup, finagling a grant for the creation of a community radio station — the money a gift of the European people, part of a European Union democracy-building program. What Député Aurélienne did not mention to the Europeans was that the man who would own and run this radio station was none other than himself.

The station quickly won loyal listeners by offering a daily diet of Compas music and soccer scores, but the choicest offering came at dusk, when Député Aurélienne, a little man in possession of an incongruously deep voice, sat in the recording booth, opened a bottle of rum, and discussed the faults of his archenemy, the Honorable Mayor Fanfan. This was a subject that could keep him going for hours. He informed his listeners of Mayor Fanfan’s corrupt and extravagant ways, his taste for young girls. All this naturally rankled Hizzoner, but what threw the mayor over the top was when the député mocked Mayor Fanfan’s considerable girth: Mayor Fanfan had a habit of traveling around town by two-stroke motorcycle, and the député commiserated with the burdens of that poor vehicle, calling it the “Mayor’s Camel” on account of the way the motorbike bobbed lazily up and down on the road as it hauled Mayor Fanfan over the rocks and dirt.

That was really going too far, and one day, with Député Aurélienne in Port-au-Prince attending to the people’s business, armed men broke down the door of the small radio station and, live and on the air, shot all four citizens found inside: the député ’s brother-in-law, his nephew, a radio engineer from the capital who had come to adjust the antenna, and a young lady whose reasons for being inside the station were never made clear. The radio engineer from Port-au-Prince lost his leg, and the young lady lost her eye; the others died. The station at that moment changed both management and political orientation.

The investigation into the shooting was assigned to Johel Célestin.

There is no precise equivalent to the juge d’instruction in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice. In the Haitian system of justice, a distant descendant of the Napoleonic Code, the juge d’instruction acts as a kind of investigative magistrate, a cross between a detective, a prosecutor, and a judge. The juge d’instruction has the power to investigate all manner of serious crimes and to imprison suspects for months at a time while the investigation proceeds. His job is to prepare a dossier that will eventually be submitted to a public prosecutor, who will then, based on the juge d’instruction ’s research, take the case to trial.

Johel pursued his investigation of the shootings in Les Irois with his customary discipline and hard work. He interviewed dozens of witnesses and took hours of depositions. Soon he had produced a preliminary dossier setting out his findings, a dossier whose conclusion went far beyond the details of the night in question.

Johel explained the facts of the dossier to Terry and the other UNPOLs. Haiti lies roughly midway between Colombia and the southeastern coast of the United States; to transport cocaine from Colombia directly to the United States is both risky and difficult. Far better to ship cocaine to southern Haiti, transport the drug overland to the northern shore, and send the freight on to the Cold Land in many smaller pieces: in cigarette boats and catamarans and slow tankers out of Port-de-Paix in the north; buried in the purses, bellies, and trick-bottom suitcases of nervous-looking Haitian or Dominican immigrants; or across the border, where more efficient Dominican dispatchers would dispatch it north in cruise ships, diplomatic pouches, and cargo holds.

On moonless nights, no place in Haiti was darker than Les Irois, where the nearest electric light was at least fifty miles away. Fishing boats would slip out onto the Caribbean, returning at dawn with bricks of cocaine wedged under their nets. The war in Les Irois then was a battle over who would harvest this lucrative catch.

Judge Célestin’s dossier proposed that the man who organized the cocaine trade in Les Irois was not the mayor, but rather his patron, Sénateur Maxim Bayard.

* * *

At first the judge had thought the shots were fireworks, like the kinds the kids set off at Carnival. Then the kitchen window exploded, and Nadia shrieked. Nadia’s cry made the judge realize that something was wrong, but still he had trouble understanding that somebody meant to do him harm. Nobody had ever wanted to harm him before. There were two different sounds: one was the sound of the shot and the other was a kind of echoing thwack as the bullet lodged in the hard cement of the house. The judge saw himself in the mirror: he was smiling, as if this all were some complicated practical joke. Nadia had already left the kitchen and was running down the corridor to the bedroom. The judge saw his own face settle into a scowl, and he followed her, patting his pocket for his phone.