Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

So Johel and Terry got to spending a lot of time together. Terry was officially charged with monitoring, mentoring, and supporting a four-man crew of PNH in the art of close personal protection. The first few weeks on the job went like this: the judge traveled everywhere with two PNH and Terry; two other PNH guarded the judge’s house during the night. Terry instructed these men as best he could, bearing in mind that he himself had almost no experience in the bodyguard’s art other than what he found on the Internet. He encouraged in the PNH alertness, attentiveness to threats, and an imposing manner. Because he considered the judge’s life at risk, Terry committed himself to remaining in his presence as many hours of the day as he could. Here was a job — because he liked the judge, because it was useful, and because he was bored — that he was determined to do well.

Terry’s commitment to the judge’s welfare, however, was not matched by an equivalent zeal on the part of his trainees. The directeur départemental of the PNH was an ally of the Sénateur’s and had agreed to create this squad of bodyguards only reluctantly. As the drama of the attempted assassination faded, one by one the directeur départemental reassigned the trainees to other duties. In a matter of weeks, Terry found himself traveling the Grand’Anse with the judge alone. No one noticed that Terry was now in charge of the monitoring, mentoring, and support of a squad that no longer existed, except on paper.

Terry and the judge soon were friends. The men shared the kind of easy chemistry that allows a couple of fellows to spend upward of eight hours a day in a car together, navigating the back roads of the Grand’Anse.

The judge, for his part, didn’t want to be out of Terry’s sight. There had been a minute or seven when the bullets were coming through the house when he knew that he was going to die. Death came into the bedroom as a great white shadow, and Johel felt the ti bon ange , his good little angel, separate from his grosser body, filleted out of matter as neatly as a butcher takes fat off meat. Then his big body heard the siren of Terry’s car, and tentatively, like a frightened cat, the ti bon ange returned home. But Johel’s soul was skittish. As the days passed, that feeling of fragile equipoise between this home and the next stayed just as strong as the minute the first bullet broke the window and the adrenaline started coursing in his veins. It made him edgy and nervous and a little nauseated, and he stopped sleeping at night. It wasn’t the rational part of his brain, but something reptilian and concerned with survival that felt better if Terry was within eyesight. So at the end of the day he made a point of inviting Terry in for drinks, and on weekends invented excuses to get him over.

As it happened, Johel’s house had been shot up just days before the World Series was scheduled to commence. Both men loved watching sports, and so they decided to go fifty-fifty on a new satellite dish to replace the old one, which the bullets had reduced to little more than an oversize colander. In this way, long days on the road visiting remote Haitian villages soon metastasized into lazy evenings at Johel’s concrete house, the generator cranked outside to keep the beer cold and the TV rolling.

When Terry told Kay about the judge, she said, “He’s got a little man-crush on you.”

Terry said, “You think?”

But Terry soon came to admire Johel too, not only for the Ivy League diplomas on the wall, but for the gentle, respectful way he spoke with everyone he met. When Terry took the judge down to the Tribunal in the morning, outside the judge’s office there was always a line of Haitian peasants, two dozen long. Terry sat sometimes and talked to the peasants, and what was most notable was the stories he didn’t hear: I was slapped in jail by the judge, kept there two weeks until my lady visited him. Price of freedom was a night with my woman and a thousand dollars. Nobody told Terry that the judge was shaking him down, wanting a stack of bills just to give Nobody a court case that would end up with Nobody humiliated and embarrassed by a pair of fancy French-speaking avocats from town, everyone laughing at Nobody, until finally the judge, upon due and proper consideration, decided that Monsieur Nobody here owed everyone his balls. That wasn’t how it was with Juge Blan. The peasants told Terry that this judge was decent. He listened. He was smart. In his courtroom or office, it was just you and the neg you’re arguing with — he planted crops on my land; he ate my goat, which wandered onto his property — the judge asking questions, rubbing his big fat chin, then saying, “This is the law.”

Terry didn’t know how to say it precisely, but he had been looking for someone like the judge for a long time.

Soon the two men were talking work. Terry had a lot of hours to watch the judge on the job, and he had advice to offer him. The judge was a fine jurist, but his training was in corporate law. The role of juge d’instruction , however, required the skills of both lawyer and lawman. The juge d’instruction was a judge, but also a detective and interrogator, someone capable of forming a dossier sufficiently complete to submit to a prosecutor. This was very similar to the work Terry had done for decades. So Terry offered the judge advice on how to pursue his investigative responsibilities: how to interrogate a suspect, how to coax a confession, and how to use that confession to convince others to confess.

The judge, for his part, offered Terry an education on the realities of rural Haiti. This place wasn’t just poor like it’s just hot, he told Terry. It was made poor. There were forces and people that made these people poor, and it wasn’t just an accident. Terry was a history buff: on his bedside table there was generally a presidential biography or a volume of popular military history. So the judge’s impromptu lectures fell on congenial ears. The judge explained to Terry that Haiti had been founded as a revolution of slaves, but the revolution hadn’t ever really ended, even now, two hundred years after the last slave owner’s throat was slit. The country was divided to this day between a very small, very wealthy pale-skinned French-speaking population — the descendants of slave owners or their mulatto offspring — and the vast population of descendants of slaves, most of them living in the country, most of them poor, Creole-speaking, and black. Power in the country tended to flip back and forth between one group and the other, politicians using national office chiefly as a means to enrich themselves and devastate their enemies.

“You mean people like Maxim Bayard?” asked Terry.

* * *

Working with trainees back home, Terry had always said, “Give ’em a KISS: Keep It Simple for the Stupid.” It was a point of pride over the years, the paucity of broken doors in his territory. As deputy sheriff, he had for years tracked down deadbeat dads just by mailing to their last known address a postcard informing them that they had won a new set of tires from a local dealership. Gentlemen presented themselves as regular as sunshine, no muss and no fuss, no overestimating the folly of Watsonville County’s criminal class. Some guys showed up twice for those tires. Then there had been the time some mastermind was hoisting power tools from garages and Terry had put an ad in the local paper, offering to buy power tools. He could tell such stories from tomorrow until the resurrection. Terry’s fundamental insight now was that they needed Mayor Fanfan to come to them.

Soon there came a day when the judge and Terry were in the judge’s office, the diplomas hanging on the wall, talking over the scandal du jour, the story of the député from Jérémie. Story starts with the European Union purchasing for the Haitian Parliament a fleet of brand new SUVs, on the reasonable grounds that parliamentarians needed some way to travel from their district to the capital. Along with the outright gift of the vehicles had been allocated a budget for maintenance of the fleet. Johel tells Terry that the député ’s tires were rolling out new every week from the parliamentary garage and coming home shredded.