Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Now, crowds don’t make decisions the way individuals do, but decisions are made, and the crowd decided first to parade around the Place Dumas with Toussaint. Then they did that again. Now that they were in possession of the body, the crowd seemed good-natured again, chanting slogans and dancing happily.

Then someone in the crowd got the bright idea to combine the two events of the day and take Toussaint’s body to the Sénateur’s rally, perhaps because it was well past lunch, and no funeral being evident, a lot of folks were thinking they’d like some pig. Crowds can move with strange speed: Toussaint’s body was around the corner and gone in an instant, and Terry, the judge, Nadia, and I were left staring at the nearly empty Place Dumas. Even Nadia, who prided herself on being surprised by nothing, was shaking her head. I supposed that when the Sénateur’s pig-eaters and Toussaint’s funeral cortege met up, it was going to be trouble. I heard the wail of sirens.

But the two crowds intermingled peacefully. By the time I got down there, you couldn’t tell who was for the Sénateur and who was for the judge. There was good music playing and pig being eaten and beer being drunk, and because nobody quite knew what to do with Toussaint at that point, they had him up on the dais, slouched in a chair, where he had a strange smile on his face, like he had finally met a lady. Neither the Sénateur nor the judge gave a speech that day.

I was reading in bed when the phone rang. The judge said something, and I said, “I was about to.” He spoke some more, and I said, “It’s fine.”

My wife said, “Who is it?” but fell back asleep before I could answer.

I lay for a while in the dark, listening to the high whine of frustrated mosquitoes on the far side of the mosquito net. I had been expecting a call like this for a long time. Then I went downstairs, where Johel was already waiting for me on the terrace.

I hadn’t seen the judge in person since Toussaint’s funeral, although his face, on campaign posters plastered on every flat surface in town, had become omnipresent. Since the funeral he had been campaigning fiercely, holding rallies, sometimes two in a day, in every corner of the region.

“This campaign is kicking your ass,” I said.

“It’s work, brother, hard work.”

He looked terrible. His eyes were red and his skin had the washed-out, bloodless gray of dark men who haven’t slept well.

“Drink?” I asked.

“Whatever you’ve got,” he said.

I poured a shot of rum for the judge and one for myself. Then we sat in silence for a few minutes. I was hoping he had got me out of bed to talk about an attractive low-risk investment opportunity. He exhaled slowly, stretched his neck, cracked his knuckles, and rubbed his eyes. He was in a torment of embarrassment.

“I want to know why Kay left,” he said.

My heart quickened. I’ve always felt honesty a severely overvalued virtue. I could see no advantage to it in the present instance.

“She told me her mother was sick.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“Maybe she thought you had enough on your plate.”

“Terry told me that her father was sick.”

“He’s married to her. He knows more about her family than I do.”

The judge’s eyes wandered to the edge of the terrace, then back to me. He decided to take a different approach.

“What do you think about Terry?”

“Seems decent enough,” I said.

He pounced. “Seems?”

“Is.”

Johel kept looking at me and looking at me, so I added, “From what I know.”

“What do you know?”

“I don’t know him any better than you do.”

“And what do you think?”

“I don’t think. Very often.”

Johel exhaled and leaned forward. I had not quite realized what a large man he was.

“Have you seen anything?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He paused, his agile, lawyerly mind working.

“Heard?” he asked.

“About Terry?”

“About me. About either of us. About Nadia.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I like you. I like all of you.”

The judge tilted his head. He smiled, a rearrangement of his face that in no way suggested mirth and in no way diminished the impression he gave of high intelligence struggling with a difficult problem. He closed his eyes and kept them shut for long enough that I almost thought he was asleep. Then he opened them and looked around.

* * *

Three days back, the judge told me, he had gone with Terry to a large rally in the town of Abricots. By now, the campaign had become a serious production, and they traveled in a caravan of four vehicles — three pickups and the judge’s SUV. The first truck was stuffed with speakers as tall as a man and a generator to power them, along with the seven members of Nadia’s old band, Galaxy, whom Nadia had convinced the judge to hire for the duration of the campaign. A free concert was a pretty good draw, and Galaxy had written a number of catchy campaign tunes, some of them enthusiastic encomia to the judge, others nasty satires about the Sénateur.

The second truck was the swag wagon. Every kid in the Grand’Anse that month was wearing a T-shirt and kicking a soccer ball with the judge’s face on it. (Kay had ordered all the swag from an importer in the Dominican Republic.) Then, if the free gear wasn’t enough, Johel had hired a squad of six marchandes to prepare vast feasts of rice, beans, piklis , and grilled chicken. These ladies would stay up half the night cooking, and then at the rallies would serve up big plates, telling each voter, “It’s Juge Blan who gives you this. Let him give you something more.” Just getting that much food into Jérémie from Port-au-Prince was an immense logistical challenge, requiring the full-time attention of three of the judge’s students.

Abricots is certainly a contender for the title of Prettiest Town on the Face of the Planet. The white sails of the two-masted fishing boats were sharp against the tranquil green waters, and the forested hills rolled right down to the edge of town. There was a church painted powder blue and white, a little cobblestoned town square, and a big tree under whose bower, if sleepiness took you in the afternoon, you could take a long nap. Folks who left Abricots for whatever reason — love, money, or necessity — never thought, as the years passed, that they’d ended up anyplace better.

The town itself had a tiny population (978, according to the census), but there were thousands more citizens living in the hills. This had never been country where the Sénateur’s popularity had run particularly deep, and the judge thought that if the voters went to the polls, and if the votes were fairly counted, they might turn out in substantial numbers for him. The double “if” depended chiefly on the goodwill of a mambo named Madame Trésor, and it was to woo Madame Trésor, as much as to woo the voters, that the judge had traveled to Abricots.

* * *

“People in Port-au-Prince eat canned fish imported from Peru,” the judge told the crowd. “You have got the sea on every side of this beautiful country, and you cannot buy a fresh fish in the capital unless you win the borlette . You go over to the Dominican Republic, they are eating fish soup, fish stew, fried fish, baked fish, whole fish, fish fillets, and fish steaks. Dominican fishermen go fishing, come back with some nice big fish, they pack it on ice, they drive it in three hours on their good paved roads to the capital. Because they have roads .

“But here, what are you going to do with that fish? Drive it two days to Port-au-Prince under a hot sun? That’ll smell terrific.”

The judge waved his hand in front of his face and pantomimed a rotten smell. The crowd tittered.