Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“In Haiti?”

“In the Grand’Anse.”

“Against Maxim Bayard?”

“Next year, maybe.”

Had the judge announced that he was auditioning for the role of Hamlet at the Old Vic that year, it would have seemed hardly a more grandiose or improbable a project than winning some contest of charisma and wiles against the legendary Sénateur.

And yet I once heard a man declare that he was going to rob a bank — and two weeks later he did it. A roommate in college joined the French Foreign Legion, announcing his decision in a voice no more swelling with excitement than that of the judge. If you meet a thousand people, one will do something that only one in a thousand will do.

“That’s ambitious,” I said.

“Things have got to change around here,” the judge said. “They have to.”

A dugout canoe was cutting across the bay, laying down lobster traps. Its motion, the swell and fall of the sea, the lapping of the waves — they were hypnotic. Things changed all the time in Haiti. They just always seemed to change for the worse. Even in the short time I had been there, I saw things declining. The road to Dame Marie was worse for the fall storms. There had been an outbreak of measles. A water pipe burst and now a swath of the town had no water. The standard Haitian response to “How are you?” was “Pas pi mal” —No worse. No worse was as good as it got.

“You hear the story about the ice chest?” I said.

“The fingers?”

Every election day, the story went, the Sénateur sent his goons around to the polling stations to offer the poll workers a cold drink, thanking them for their labors. Inside the ice chest, on a bed of ice, there’s nothing but human fingers and bottles of Coke, all those fingers stained with the indelible ink which identifies a voting citizen — presumably someone who had voted for the Sénateur’s opponent. After that, the poll workers often found their way to slip a ballot or two the Sénateur’s way.

“That doesn’t scare you?” I asked.

“In six years since we’re back, I have yet to meet a nine-fingered man,” Johel said. “And believe you me, I’ve looked.”

“Brave man.”

“Stories like that, that’s the way Maxim is,” the judge said. “That’s how he maintains and perpetuates power. He’s a talker.” That didn’t seem enough, so he added, “Was it safe for Martin Luther King to march in Birmingham? Was it safe for Gandhi? Was it safe for Nelson Mandela, spending twenty-seven years in prison? Was that safe? Things have got to change around. People can’t go on living like this.”

Terry seemed to sense that the judge had stumbled. He said, “What you got to understand — Johel and I are in the trenches here every day. You’ve got no idea what’s going on here, really going on here. People come up to us, they say, ‘Thank you, Judge. God bless you, Judge.’ People say, ‘If only you were president, Judge.’ People offer him money, he never takes a dime. Real money sometimes. You go anywhere in the Grand’Anse, I bet they know Johel. We go up into the mountains, they know him. And they’re asking him for help every day of the week.”

“What’s wrong with the guy they got?”

Terry said, “Are you kidding me—”

The judge interrupted him. His voice was soothing, calm.

“Is this a — confidential conversation?” he asked.

“I’m not friends with the Sénateur.”

“You live in his house.”

“I’ve never met him.”

“We’re not hiding anything,” the judge said. “But I haven’t made any decisions, and I’d prefer if this was — between friends.”

I nodded, and the judge leaned in. His face was glossy with sweat.

“You know the new road they talk about?” he said.

Jérémie was just one hundred and twenty-five miles or so from Port-au-Prince as the vulture flew, but the trip overland on the old road, the Route Nationale Numéro Deux, could take fourteen or fifteen hours, if the road was passable at all. When the summer rains set in or the fall hurricanes blew through, the road was just mud. Rumor held that a Canadian proposal to build a modern road connecting Jérémie to the southern port city of Les Cayes — where a two-lane highway to Port-au-Prince began — had been rebuffed by the government of Haiti.

“It’s true,” the judge said.

“I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t when I first heard it. Something like that, you’d think you’d hear about it. I mean, it’s a road. A whole damn road. Seventy million American dollars. Maxim Bayard won’t let it go through.”

“He wants a cut?” I said.

“Nothing like that. Government gives the okay, the Canadians give the money to the Inter-American Development Bank, the IADB puts out the call for tender, pays the winning bid directly. Last time, they awarded the contract to some Italian outfit to build that one up north. That’s a good road now. Government of Haiti never sees a dime, just gets a road.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“That’s just what I asked. I put in a call to Port-au-Prince. And what the minister of finance says is his hands are tied. I say, who’s tying them? He says Maxim will bring down the government if he signs the accord. Or worse.”

“What’s his deal?” I asked.

The judge spread his hands wide.

“Man doesn’t want a road,” he said.

“But who doesn’t want a road?”

“Sénateur Maxim Bayard, that’s who.”

“Why doesn’t anyone mention something like that?” I asked. It seemed to me the kind of story that you’d read in newspapers.

The judge said, “The Canadians are as embarrassed as anyone. That money’s just sitting there in an escrow account, waiting for a signature. Once the money’s budgeted — that’s a slap in the face. Heads roll in Ottawa, that money just sits there.”

The thought of decapitated Canadian civil servants distracted me. I was startled to find Cherie standing at the table with our drinks and plantains.

“What would you do if there was a road to Port-au-Prince?” I asked her.

“I’d go to Port-au-Prince and buy a new dress,” she said, putting the food and glasses on the table. She spun her skirt in a coquettish circle. “Then I’d never come back.”

“I guess a road would make some difference,” I said to the judge, watching Cherie amble back to the kitchen.

The plantains were salty and topped with piklis so spicy it burned your nostrils before it burned your tongue. The judge ate a plantain, then another. He tilted his head and considered me. What you had in the judge was one of those men who looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your intelligence and finding it lacking. Terry looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your manliness and finding it lacking. Between the two of them, they had all bases covered. “How much you pay for bananas? Or for mangoes?” the judge asked.

There were at least two dozen varieties of mango in the Grand’Anse, but my favorite was the mangue Madame Blan , a mango whose tawny skin sliced open to reveal pale flesh as inviting as the thighs of that long-ago golden-haired plantation mistress for whom the fruit was named. I had once believed that the South Indian mango known as the Alphonso was the finest mango in the world, but this mango was subtler, less fibrous, and more sensual.

“A couple gourdes, maybe?”

“I pay one gourde one banana. And I pay ten gourdes a mango,” he said.

“Is that a lot?” I asked.

“You know how much a banana costs in Port-au-Prince? In Port-au-Prince, a capital city of a tropical nation, sometimes you pay twenty-five gourdes for a banana. Sometimes more.”

He was waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he kept talking.