Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

This Moulin Sur Mer, Dolan said. Would you say it’s a nice place to vacation, you know, take your wife?

The answer was yes, within a certain twisted context of circumstance and impulse. If you had to be in Haiti, the resort was as good as any place to reinvigorate yourself. A qualified yes, if you were the sort of naive, half-cracked traveler drawn to the edge of the abyss, someone whose rum sours were that much more quenching when consumed at the panoramic center of extreme malice and human suffering. Not to be self-righteous about the attraction; Harrington had always found the sours at Moulin Sur Mer to be memorably tart and bracing when he straggled in off the road like a legionnaire from the desert. And yes, he had even taken his wife there on her brief and unpleasant visit to the island.

What else? Tom asked. What are you looking for?

I have a client, Dolan began, and out came the story.

For the third or fourth time in a year, an American couple, husband and wife, were on holidays in Haiti, booked into the Moulin Sur Mer. That can’t be right, Tom thought. Undoubtedly the man had business in Haiti and for some reason kept inviting his wife along, or she refused to be left behind. Perhaps she was an art collector, or perhaps a nurse, someone with a skill to share, an altruistic streak.

The couple checked out of the resort late on a Saturday afternoon, Dolan continued, put their luggage in the sports utility vehicle they had rented for the week, and began the hour-and-a-half drive to the airport in the capital to board a return flight to Miami and on to Tampa, where they lived. At some point along the road south of the hotel — Conrad Dolan was imprecise about the location although he named the second quarry as a landmark — the man slowed the vehicle to a crawl to maneuver through a series of potholes. By now the sun had set, and although it was dark, very dark, and the road seemed empty, without headlights in either direction, the couple was overtaken from behind by two men on a motorbike who, after blurring past the SUV, swung sharply in front of it, stopped in a blocking position, and hopped off. The husband attempted to steer around them but the shoulder seemed to drop away and somehow he had trouble with the manual transmission and stalled the vehicle. What happened next was unclear, except for the results.

The men had guns. Dolan’s client was pulled from the driver’s seat and pistol-whipped, and although he never lost consciousness he had the sense knocked out of him and scrambled away into the darkness on the opposite side of the road, finally crashing into a boulder and slipping down to hide, bleeding profusely from a wound in his forehead. A gun had been fired several times, he assumed at him, to prevent his escape. When he regained his senses and came out from behind the rock, the SUV and the motorcycle were gone, and at first he couldn’t find his wife but then he stepped on her where she lay on the shoulder of the road, faceup, shot to death.

Disoriented, the man stumbled around until finally a car came up the road from the direction of Port-au-Prince and he flagged it down. As luck would have it, the driver turned out to be a staffer from the American embassy who used his cell phone to dial the local emergency number and the response was unexpectedly quick; before long a pickup truck carrying uniformed officers from the police station in Saint-Marc arrived on the scene. The police spent a few minutes glancing around with flashlights, asked the man some basic questions using the embassy staffer as translator, and then put the body in the bed of the pickup truck and drove off, telling him to wait there because someone else was coming to ask more questions. Some time later, another car arrived from the direction of Port-au-Prince, driven by a detective from the National Police Headquarters.

Conrad Dolan paused in his narrative and Tom took advantage of the moment to ask him the obvious question: Why was this unfortunate man, clearly the victim of assault and robbery, his client?

I’m closing in on that, said Dolan. Assault, yes. Robbery, no. Would you say, he asked, that such incidents are commonplace in Haiti?

Aid workers, missionaries, the rare tourist — the ambushes weren’t everyday occurrences by any means, but they happened. The roads were dangerous. You stayed alert, practiced prudence, of course, and hoped you were lucky.

Okay, said Dolan, and continued. The detective from Port-au-Prince was fairly vexed that the body had been spirited away to the Saint-Marc station before he could survey the crime scene, an examination he performed hastily because there was nothing left to see other than a blot of jellied blood in the dirt by the side of the road.

Although the detective only spoke Kreyol, the embassy staffer, who was headed north with his wife to spend their Sunday on the beach at Moulin Sur Mer, expressed his sympathy to the client, gave him his card, and left. The husband’s skull was pounding, he felt numb, dazed, and when the detective opened the passenger door for him he climbed in and slumped into the seat, never saying a word during the ride south to Port-au-Prince, never hearing a word he could understand. The detective took him to a police station near the airport, sat him down at a table in a room, and left him there alone. A while later another detective came in, a guy who had lived in Brooklyn and spoke English. He gave the husband a wet rag to wipe his face, water to drink, and talked to him for about ten minutes — standard procedure, predictable questions — but the man was distraught, his head was not clear, and his answers were not helpful. The detective asked if he wanted to see a physician. The man said no. Okay, the detective said, I’m sending you to the Hotel Montana for the night but I want you to return in the morning to make a full report.

The manager of the hotel and her staff were shocked by the man’s condition and saddened to learn the fate of his wife, and they treated him with exceptional kindness, summoning a doctor to stitch up the gash above his right eye, finding him clean clothes and toiletries for the night, sending a meal to his room. In the morning the manager called the room to say that a car was waiting for him downstairs to take him back to the police station and that she had asked the hotel’s accountant to accompany him, to serve as his interpreter.

At the police station, he was met by the same detective who’d driven him back to the city the night before and was informed that his rental car had been found abandoned on the edge of Tintayen and impounded in a lot behind the building. He was also told that he and his wife’s possessions — their luggage, jewelry, laptop computer, cell phone, camera — had also been recovered from the car but could not be released back to him until he had signed the statement he had made the previous night in the station. The client said he couldn’t remember what he had said last night but okay, give it to him to sign, but the detective said no, not yet possible, it was still being translated from English into Kreyol and French.

In the meantime the detective asked that he come along to the impoundment lot, where he was shown the SUV and told to get back in the car and drive it to the crime scene for a reenactment of the event. The SUV had a bullet hole through the passenger’s window, its seats were splashed with blood, and the client refused, offering to drive any other car than this one, stinking with the smell of his wife’s death, back north on Route Nationale One. They returned to the station and the accountant, who had been translating the conversation, was told by the detective to leave.

The man was taken to the same room as the night before and told to wait. Hours passed until, eventually, the detective returned, sat down across from him, and pushed a document and a ball-point pen across the table. The handwritten statement was seventeen pages long but the client didn’t have a clue what it said because it was not in English, so naturally he wasn’t going to put his name on it. The detective, out of patience, got up and left the room. Moments later the door banged open, a pair of cops came in, grabbed him by the arms, and led him out and when he realized they intended to put him in a holding cell he began struggling. Three more uniforms joined the fray and the five of them succeeded in muscling the man into the cell.