Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

A month away, a month at home, the whiplashed schedule of a humanitarian yo-yo, a perpetual routine of domestic guess who. Honey? I’m home. Maybe. Hope so. Sorry to have missed the kid’s birthday.

He was sitting on a bench outside the quad of his daughter’s small private school nestled within a grove of banyan trees and palms, a cigarette in his mouth, waiting for classes to end. The school offered no bus service or, rather, discontinued it when over-involved parents made the convenience superfluous, and it was Tom’s duty to relieve his wife of this chore whenever he was in town. That day he was early; usually he was late. Other parents began arriving.

I never see you, someone said, a woman’s voice, behind him, and he swiveled around. This woman lived in the neighborhood but worked in an office downtown for a nationwide private security firm, doing what he could not tell. She was tough and brusque and solid and it was strange to see her in a flowery dress and not in the jeans and motorcycle boots and fringed leather jacket she wore when he would bump into her in the South Beach bars. Her daughter had been the first in seventh grade to wear makeup to class; Tom’s wife and daughter were still warring over lip gloss and eye shadow.

She propped her sunglasses into her streaked hair and squinted. Do you know? — and she named a man, Conrad Dolan.

Doors banged open and the children came in streams of ones and twos into the courtyard. No, he said. Was he supposed to?

Without saying why, she explained she had spoken with him a few days back, up in Tampa where he lived. A journalist had been kidnapped last month in Peru. Dolan was the hostage negotiator brought in on the case.

Harrington’s interest rose. How does one become a hostage negotiator? he asked.

Twenty-one years with the Feds, fluency in Spanish and Portuguese, she said. He was private sector now, retired from the Bureau of Investigation.

One of your guys?

I wish. He works alone.

Tom had never heard of him. He did not personally know many people like this, although they were always there in the background of his world; their days were different than his, more exclusive, circumscribed by their respective loyalties and institutions. Wherever you encountered them, there was less oxygen in the room for the uninitiated. You see them around, you talk with them when you have to. You stay out of their way — they keep you out of their way.

What happened to the journalist?

Dolan got him out.

Their two daughters marched toward them, pretty faces sullen and pinched as if they had spent the day in court litigating their grievances. His at least knew to mumble a greeting before she slipped past to fling her books into the cab of his truck. The other one narrowed her eyes at them and kept walking toward the parking lot and her mother’s car.

What do you suppose that’s about?

Being twelve. Being girls.

Jingling her keys, she said she had to run. The sunglasses fell and locked back over her eyes. So look, she said. Can I give Dolan your number? He wants to talk to you.

Their seemingly idle conversation had taken an unexpected turn — Harrington’s working days were often spent seeking out authorities or tracking witnesses, knocking on the doors of strangers in search of the texture of lives under pressure or suddenly inflated into crisis, forming ephemeral intimacies with people never quite sure of his identity beyond the fact that he was in their eyes a foreign representative of a monolithic process. Ah, he has come to find me justice. Ah, he has come to challenge my power. Ah, he has come to help. Ah, he has come to ruin me .

Why would he want to talk to me? Tom asked.

The answer was at once familiar and tedious and he thought nothing of it. Dolan loved to follow the news, he had seen Harrington’s work on establishing a Truth Commission in Haiti, he liked to talk. Tom thought to himself, What was there left to talk about? After two hundred years Haiti had remained an infant and still required breast-feeding, but he said, Sure, give him the number, and they separated, each to their spoiled child, for a recitation of the day’s unforgivable crimes of pubescence.

Three days later Dolan telephoned. Before Tom even had a chance to say hello, the person on the line had announced himself— Dolan here —and for a moment Tom paused, unsure of who this was. I sawr what you said about those bastards in Warshington . . It was a voice, a type of nasal tone and run-on pattern of speech, that he associated with the cinema, the urban repertoire of the eastern United States, make-believe cops and make-believe robbers, Irish heroes and Italian villains, an accent resonant of both ivy and whiskey, upward mobility and the working-class neighborhoods of South Boston. It was not a voice he could listen to without smiling and if his wife had been in the room he would have cupped the mouthpiece and held out the phone and said, Get a load of this . But the abrupt specificity of his questions made Tom tight and serious: Dolan had connected with the right source. Tom was valuable, Tom had the answers. He knew what Conrad Dolan wanted to know.

Say, what can you tell me about the condition of the Route Nationale One between Port-au-Prince and that town up the coast, what is it? Saint-Marc?

In the earliest days of the invasion, weeks before the American military ventured out onto the road they would instantly name the Highway to Hell, Route Nationale One from Port-au-Prince to its terminus on the north shore was a six-hour-long gauntlet of axle-breaking misery, slamming boredom, heat, and fear. The tarmac had been carpet bombed by neglect, its surface so pocked and corroded that only a sharp-edged webbing of the original asphalt remained, so that the highway resembled a hundred-mile strip of Swiss cheese, many of the holes the size of a child’s wading pool. In September of 1994, it was empty except for macoutes and bandits, or impromptu checkpoints that provided the opportunity for extortion to gangs of boys with machetes. Regardless of its disrepair, you drove Route Nationale One at top speed to reach your destination by nightfall, for it wasn’t a good place to be after the sun went down.

What else do you want to know? he asked Dolan.

The section of the road by the big quarry, across from the swamp, what the hell’s the name of it?

Tintayen.

There were stretches of the highway, especially outside of the capital along the coast, where if you focused deep and hard on the game you could rocket up to 120 kilometers per hour for five or ten minutes, slaloming around the hazards, making everybody with you carsick and terrified. Graveyards of wrecks dotted these stretches; pedestrians and livestock were occasionally killed by swerving drivers. About nine months into the occupation, a Haitian company was awarded a contract, funded by foreign aid, to resurface the highway. The requisite embezzlements ensued and a thin scab of rotten asphalt was rolled over the newly graded roadbed. Within a month, though, the pavement had festered and bubbled, the holes began to reappear where they had always been, and if you needed a quick metaphor to sketch the trajectory of American involvement in Haiti, Route Nationale One was there for your consideration.

And this other quarry. There’s supposed to be another one, right?

That’s right. Up the coast, on the water.

Good place to run and hide?

What do you mean?

If you’re in trouble. Trying to get away from somebody.

Not really.

And what about this place on the coast, Moulin Sur Mer? asked Dolan. You ever been there?

Lovely. Clean. Expensive by any standard. Good restaurant. Ruling-class getaway. Well-connected owners. The only reliable R & R between the capital and the north coast. Are you planning a trip? Tom wondered aloud.