“You have a relative in Fort Dimanche?”
Oscar had heard Raymond’s words.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Raymond held his breath. “Raymond L’Eveillé,” he croaked.
“How interesting,” Oscar said.
Raymond’s throat ached. He was thirsty, he was hot, and yet he planted his feet firmly on the ground and waited without moving. A Tonton Macoute, dressed in an oversized tuxedo, pulled out a pistol from the folds of his ill-fitted vest and aimed it at Raymond’s face. Raymond’s heart fell, and he resisted the urge to shut his eyes.
“Sir, he came here on a mission to kill you,” the gunman spat. “Look at what he did to your car! He’s an assassin. A hired assassin!”
“I’m a simple cabbie, trying to get by. I’m no assassin. I’m unarmed. I don’t even have a penny to my name to fix up your car. Something jammed.”
He tried to calm the tremor in his knees. The Frenchman, meanwhile, was wiping the sweat off his brow furiously with a silk handkerchief as pink as his necktie. The warden stared back, said nothing. Then, just as Raymond felt like his eardrums would burst under the pressure of his own heartbeat, Oscar smiled.
“You could have killed me, and you would have, if I were in this car. But thankfully, no one is hurt.”
Oscar scanned the crowd behind him, offering a repulsive, toothy grin that seemed to chill only Raymond. The Frenchman grinned right back, chuckling nervously.
“Things could be much worse,” Oscar said. “We can settle this matter tomorrow. Report to my office at eight thirty—”
Raymond shook his head. No. That wasn’t the plan. “But—”
“We’ll get your car out of there,” Oscar said. “My men will give you a lift home.”
Oscar curled his lips and lowered his voice as he spoke those last words, as if Raymond were one of his mistresses in need of cajoling before being struck. Raymond clenched his teeth and watched the warden motion for him to disappear from his sight. With the Frenchman appeased, Oscar waved for his mistress to follow. They turned to head back inside the hotel.
“Wait,” Raymond cried. “But wait, sir! What about my brother in Fort Dimanche? What about him?”
Oscar’s men surrounded him. There was a scramble, orders shouted, a revving of engines. Someone had him by the arm, and he did nothing to fight back. When he landed on the seat, he looked through the window. The warden was gone. The crowd was gone. Everything was back to normal. No, he didn’t want to be driven home. He wanted to be thrown into prison, to save his brother’s life. He looked out the window again, his vision blurry, hoping to catch one final glimpse of his beloved Datsun, and tapped the picture of his family in his pocket. The driver got behind the wheel, and two men climbed in the backseat with Raymond. He knew their weapons could decide his fate.
The men stared straight ahead.
“Where to?” The driver glanced in the rearview mirror.
Raymond tried to see his eyes, but the man avoided his gaze. Instead, he looked at one of the henchmen seated next to Raymond. The car idled quietly.
Raymond muttered his address. If he had to wait till tomorrow to confront the warden, to get himself arrested, then that’s what he’d do. He’d have to be flexible, do whatever it took to see his brother. He thought of his car again as they drove through the gates, and of his family as he passed his children’s school and then the neighborhood of Turgeau, where Nicolas and Eve had lived. It wasn’t until they passed his own neighborhood and kept right on going that he realized, squeezed between the heat of these two men, their skin burning with the kind of hunger that urged them to be killers, that they were not stopping. They were driving deeper into the belly of Port-au-Prince. Deeper into the snarl of marketplaces and businesses, of gingerbread houses and low-rise slums, until the car turned onto the familiar boulevard, sinking into the dusk obscuring the capital. Deeper and deeper, until he knew, with the strangest sadness he had ever known, that they were headed for Fort Dimanche.
FIFTEEN
Major was dying.
Nicolas had observed his fever and delirium during the hottest nights, had heard his unrelenting cough, how he spit up blood in the kin. It had to be tuberculosis. The other cellmates had implored the guards to remove him for fear of contamination, but in vain.
Now Major lay shivering in the heat, glued to his mat in the corner. Nicolas tried to stay far away from him, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they all contracted the disease, before they all died. One of the prisoners had stripped off Major’s underwear and they’d forced him to use it to cover his mouth when coughing. He clutched it like a security blanket, and Nicolas saw that it was speckled with dried blood.
Major kept his eyes closed. His breathing was shallow, and it seemed for a while that he’d already drawn his last breath. He was withering away and had lost all his arrogance and his power over the other inmates. The tables had turned, and no one wanted to nurse him.
“Is he dead yet?” Boss asked.
Nicolas wished he had died. Not because of his dislike for Major, but because watching any man die a slow death was unbearable. If felt inhumane to watch someone fade away without helping.
“Not fast enough if you ask me,” an inmate whispered in the dark.
The other inmates snickered, but Nicolas gritted his teeth.
“I can’t rejoice in another man’s suffering,” he said, eyeing Major’s frail body.
It was frightening to watch him twitch like a dying animal. His shriveled body curled in the fetal position, and soon he stopped moving. Nicolas would have covered him up if they’d had a blanket.
“We don’t take pity on Macoutes in here,” a prisoner spat.
“He was an enemy,” Boss added. “You couldn’t take a shit without him berating you. You can show him your high and mighty compassion if you want, Maître, but as far as we’re concerned, he’s as good as dead.”
Nicolas looked over at the old man who’d been so kind to him when he arrived. Boss was a good man himself, but now Nicolas was seeing another side of him. In this moment, he was as cunning and heartless as any guard in this dungeon. Every man had his limits, Nicolas thought, and Fort Dimanche was the place to test them.
“That man over there, that could be you or me,” Nicolas said. “Could be any one of us.”
Nicolas waited for an expression of remorse, but he got no answer. The men ignored him. One of them sucked his teeth, a gesture of impatience. Nicolas sighed.
“I don’t want to die like this,” he muttered.
“Maybe we won’t,” said a man squatting in a corner. “I heard the guards talking this morning. President Johnson says he’s going to continue in Kennedy’s footsteps. They’re looking closely at human rights violations here.”
Nicolas eyed the man with pity.
“You think this President Johnson is going to save us?” Nicolas scoffed. “Why hasn’t he landed troops here then, like he just did in Santo Domingo? How far does one need to look to see what is happening in this country?”
The other prisoners kept quiet, afraid the conversation was getting too political, worried there might be a spy among them ready to report their whispers to Papa Doc. But Nicolas knew they clung to hope. They imagined it in everything. If one picked up a penny outside, it meant their fortune would change. If another dreamed of a visitor, as Boss claimed to have done last night, it also meant change. Rumors about possible political change kept them alive, but Nicolas had stopped believing that America, or France, or any other country would really do anything.
We are not a priority to anyone but ourselves, he thought.
He shook his head. “Don’t be foolish. No one will intervene for us when Haiti is still being chastised for claiming its freedom. Kennedy didn’t have a chance to—”
Major’s coughing spell interrupted him. The men held their breath, waiting for it to pass like a bad storm. When he stopped, they stared at his body as if expecting him to expire on the
spot.
“Don’t you see what we are?” Nicolas said. “How does this make us better than him?”
They sat in silence, after that, digesting the sight of death doing its work.
Nicolas was certain Major still had breath left in him when the guards came. Two of the prisoners were forced to carry him. There was no singing for him, but the inmates crossed themselves and said a quick prayer to will his spirit out of their cell.
When the conscripted undertakers returned, one of the men sat down quietly in a corner. He would never speak again after that. The second one vomited in the bucket.
“They made us dig a ditch,” he groaned. “They made us throw him in and bury him. He was moaning the whole time. Just moaning.”
“There’s no room in hell for these monsters,” another prisoner whispered.
Nicolas rolled up Major’s mat. They couldn’t clean the cell, so they prayed the tuberculosis away, hoping it wouldn’t spread. He sat with the second prisoner, who was compulsively pulling at every strand of hair on his head. He knew that there was no way to comfort him, but he tried to find a magic combination of words.
“You didn’t have a choice,” Nicolas said. “You had to follow orders. What else could you do?” He knew his words fell on deaf ears. He wasn’t sure how a person could recover from such a traumatic event.
“I did have a choice,” the young man sobbed, his face hidden in his hands. “I was a coward. I could have joined him in the grave. They would have shot me, or thrown me in with him to suffocate. I’m a Catholic. How can I bury a man alive? I should have died with him.”
“That would not be right,” Nicolas said.
Later that day, the guards returned to the cell and ordered all the prisoners to stand up. Nicolas felt fear slice through him. No one knew what was happening. Maybe it was an execution, maybe even Nicolas’s. He tried to feel grateful for a chance to exit this hell. The guards barked orders at them.
“To the showers!”
Nicolas followed the line outside the building, breathing in relief. He hadn’t wanted to die after all, had he? His heart felt lighter and filled with gratitude for an opportunity to use water, to shower, to wash off the filth from his skin, and then to drink fresh water that didn’t taste like porridge or cornmeal or beans in the bottom of his food plate. A shower outside was an opportunity to forget, to wash away what had just happened to Major, if that were possible.
“There must be a reason for the showers,” the prisoners whispered. “Maybe they’re releasing us.”
Hope still burned in some, a persistent ember that would not die. Nicolas suspected the showers were simply to head off the spread of tuberculosis.
The guards led the prisoners to a courtyard behind the barracks. Nicolas hadn’t noticed this place before because it was separated from the septic tank area. The prisoners were divided into four lines. They moved like an army of zombies, blinded in the sudden daylight. The clouds above were pregnant with a rain that never fell, and the air was heavy with a steamy heat.
Nicolas found coolness in the shade of a small tree growing against a concrete wall where four rusty faucets were aligned. This would be his first chance at bathing since getting here. As the guards shouted orders, Nicolas realized he would be allowed only three minutes to wash his face, maybe his arms, and maybe, if he got lucky, have a chance to drink.
The prisoners knelt under the faucets and cupped their hands under thin streams of water. They gulped voraciously before being pushed out of the way. Others washed their faces, scrubbed their hands. The water ran brown at their feet, and Nicolas saw a prisoner wash the pus from his wounds. He tried to remember the last time he'd had a bath, and he swallowed back his burning desire for soap.
Nicolas tried to keep his eyes open. The gray light burned until his skin felt like it was turning to ash. He rubbed his stomach with his dry hands and felt his ribs under his fingers. Soon he'd be skeletal. He was still alive, though. For how long, he didn't know, but he was still alive, and if God wasn't dead, as Oscar had said, if God was testing him, he would play along like Job. For some reason, he was overwhelmed with the promise of the sun hiding behind clouds, the stream of water, he almond three.
The guards patrolled the ranks. If they heard talking, they lashed out at the prisoners’ ribs or backs with the butts of their weapons. Nicolas tried to look through them like ghosts, but he couldn’t ignore their menacing omnipresence. Then he saw him again, the young guard who was always watching him.
He seemed young, barely twenty-five. Nicolas heard the other guards call him by his first name, Elon. He was about six feet tall, and his brown skin seemed dewy in the daylight. Nicolas had never been this close to him before. He was just a child compared with the others, but his face was grave.
Elon walked toward him. Nicolas kept his eyes semi-closed, head down to deflect a possible confrontation. His knees trembled as he heard the sound of boots clicking on the ground. What did he want? Elon stopped, ground his boots into the earth, and leaned in conspiratorially.
“You! Prisoner!” he hissed.
Nicolas looked up, startled. At that moment, the clouds parted to reveal a brilliant sun against the cinder-block sky.
“Nicolas L’Eveillé?”
Nicolas hesitated.
“Do exactly as I say,” the young guard said.
He had an amazing ability, Nicolas noticed, to speak without moving his lips.
“No sudden movements. Look to your right.”
Why was this man talking to him? Nicolas blinked, tried to make sense of the words.
“I won’t repeat myself!”
Obedience was Nicolas’s safest bet, so he turned his head and saw the line of emaciated men burning in the sun. What was he supposed to look for? He decided this was one of those vicious tricks guards played on inmates, like when they pretended to release someone and picked him up again later that day, right at the doorstep of his home. Nicolas was certain he would lose his sanity if that ever happened to him. He was about to turn back to the young guard when he caught a movement in the corner of his eye.
At first, Nicolas thought it was a bird. But no. It was a black hand signaling to him. His eyes narrowed as he tried to focus, confused and desperate. Then Nicolas’s face lit up, his lips stretching into a smile. Was he hallucinating? Tears sprang to his eyes. His brother was waving at him. Raymond. Nicolas blinked repeatedly, but his eyes were not deceiving him, it wasn’t a mirage. He raised his arm to wave, forgetting where he was. His mouth opened to yell, yawning wide, as if he’d swallowed sunshine, but Raymond shook his head tersely and looked away.
Just as quickly as it had come, Nicolas’s smile faded and he was overwhelmed with the reality of Raymond’s presence here. So they had gotten everyone. Jean-Jean. Georges. And it was all his fault. His heart shattered at the thought of other names: Eve. Amélie.
“That’s your brother?” the guard asked.
He had been watching Nicolas’s expression shift from elation to horror, cradling his rifle and squinting under the sun. Nicolas nodded without thinking, forgetting for a moment that, in here, every question carried with it the threat of instant repercussions. He panicked. His line moved quickly, and there was only one prisoner in front of him now. The guard operating the faucets yelled at Nicolas.
“Move it!”
Elon shoved Nicolas forward and walked away. At the faucet, Nicolas gulped down as much water as he could, but he was distracted, knowing his brother was standing nearby in the sun. The prisoners were soon ordered back inside. Nicolas felt part of his soul die as he reentered his cell. He would have preferred to collapse outside than to expire in this steamy, crummy cave. But he felt hopeful now. He’d seen Raymond and he was convinced that they would find a way to speak to each other.
In the evening, the guards came knocking at the doors with their clubs. Supper arrived in a tin bucket, a watered-down porridge with a roll of stale bread. The men grabbed their plates with haste and broke into the mold
y bread. Nicolas looked at Elon, who was standing on the threshold. The young guard’s eyes were disconcertingly blank.
Returning Nicolas’s gaze, he demanded, “Something wrong with your food?”
Nicolas shook his head. The other inmates eyed him curiously. It was a strange question for a guard from Fort Dimanche. Nicolas bit into his roll, chewing quickly. The food distributor waddled away down the hall, his bowed legs arching away from each other painfully, and Elon shut the door.
Nicolas broke off another piece of bread and felt something strange in his mouth. He spat it out immediately, hoping it wasn’t a bug. In his hands was a small piece of folded paper. He looked around. The men were eating furiously, their lips making smacking sounds. No one had seen.
Once he was sure no one was watching, he unfolded the wet paper, which began to tear apart in his warm fingers. He made out a scribble, the letters smudged: “Kin.” Nicolas frowned for a moment before understanding set in. Then, without another thought, Nicolas smiled and shoved the paper into his mouth. It wasn’t hard to swallow.
SIXTEEN
A coral sky stretched over the small yard. Raymond tried to orient himself, coming to terms with the reality of life at Fort Dimanche: once here, behind these walls, the sun never again actually rose or set.
The reeking bucket in Raymond’s hands stung his eyes. As the new man in his cell, he had volunteered to take it outside, and no one had objected. No one cared about him, it seemed. They wanted to know how he got here in his cell, but that was the extent of their concern. When the guards announced he was to be executed with his brother on August twenty-seventh, as requested by Warden Oscar, no one flinched. It was as if they were zombified, lobotomized, even. Only one prisoner muttered a response, avoiding eye contact with him.
“At least you know when,” he said. “Not knowing is the worst part.”
His brother was close by, just two prisoners away.
He glanced over his shoulder, and when nobody was looking, tapped the shoulder of the man in front of him. Raymond pointed at his brother and made a sign, and the inmate understood what he wanted. Quickly, Raymond skipped ahead, slipping into his new spot and slumping low to blend back into the line, nearly spilling the contents of his bucket in the process. His heart racing, he took a few breaths. This was the only way, he told himself. He had to push his luck, further and further, so he repeated his maneuver until he finally stood behind his brother.
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