Nicolas tried to turn as soon as he realized Raymond was there.
“Easy,” Raymond said. “Don’t turn around.”
“What are you doing here?” Nicolas hissed. “Why is that guard helping us?”
“We have a friend in common,” he whispered back. “I came to get you out of here.”
Nicolas chuckled silently. The idea was too absurd.
“I have a plan,” his brother whispered into his neck. “Trust me.”
“So you got yourself arrested?”
Raymond shifted the bucket to his other hand. The metal handle weighed heavily against his palm and bit into the callused flesh of his fingers.
“That reporter I saved in Cité Simone? Remember him?” Raymond murmured. “He’s helping me. And we have a friend in here. An ally.”
Nicolas kept his eyes glued on his bucket as the two brothers stood side by side at the ditch. Raymond took in Nicolas’s frail figure and his grayish skin.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
Nicolas checked to make sure the guards weren’t looking. “How the hell did you get here, really? Did they come for you?”
“Don’t worry about that right now,” Raymond whispered. “Listen, Eve and Amélie are in the Dominican Republic. I put them on a boat myself. Now it’s your turn. Come August twenty-seventh, we have a plan.”
Nicolas shook his head. Was Raymond delusional?
“Escape?” he hissed as the men finished dumping their buckets, the flies swarming gleefully. The ground began to burn his feet, but Nicolas ignored the pain. “Are you crazy?”
“Have some faith,” Raymond said as he shook his bucket and turned, gagging at the stench. “And yes, I may be a little crazy. I’m here, aren’t I?”
Nicolas didn’t seem to hear him and Raymond saw the darkness in his brother’s eyes. It was only a matter of time until he lost all sense of himself, like the rest of these wretches around them. A guard strode forward, pointing his rifle.
“Break’s over, get back inside.”
The men lined up quietly. As they marched back into the fortress, Raymond leaned in again.
“I’ll contact you soon,” he whispered. “Keep your eyes and ears open. You’ll see your family again. Trust me.” They came to their cells, where two guards were waiting, weapons in hand.
“I’ve never let you down before, have I?”
The brothers’ eyes met once more before the cell doors shut.
SEVENTEEN
The men in Raymond’s cell also kept a calendar on the wall. They used a heart-shaped stone picked up from the yard, etching lines into the cement. When the main calendar keeper died of a bladder infection, someone else took over, marking a new day each time he heard a distant humming. A small aircraft patrolled the skies around five thirty every morning. This was the prisoners’ only clock: the whine of an engine at high altitude. Each time it passed, Raymond and Nicolas moved one day ever closer to August and their execution.
Raymond kept to himself and Nicolas didn’t press him for further details. Elon rarely spoke a word to either of them, gave no sign of sympathy. The wait was excruciating for Raymond, and soon his nails were bitten to the quick. The reality of his situation frightened him, but just when he was about to give in to despair, just when he thought he’d made a terrible mistake in trusting Sauveur, something happened. It was July 10, and the heat was stifling.
The prisoners seemed to be asleep with their eyes open, but they perked up when they heard the key turning in the lock. Panicked, they scurried toward the shadows and clung to the walls.
“Taxi! You’re coming with me!”
Raymond didn’t wait to be told twice. He jumped to his feet and followed the silhouette down the black hall of the prison. The young guard was walking quickly, his heels clicking against the hard tile. Raymond worried someone might find them there, ask why they were wandering through the fortress. Elon stopped and turned to Raymond, his hand twitching around the barrel of his rifle.
“You know Milot?” he asked.
“Yes, chief. I’m Raymond L’Eveillé, a taxi driver. I drove him out of Cité Simone—”
“Keep your voice down!”
The young guard looked around, making sure no one had seen or heard them. He looked into Raymond’s eyes. “Don’t call me chief,” he said. “There’s only one chief here, and that’s the chief supervisor. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir—”
“Quiet! I will confirm the plan with you when I can. It could be weeks.”
Someone was coming down the stairs. Elon grabbed his shoulder and rushed him back toward his cell. Raymond wanted to scream. They were so close to Nicolas. They couldn’t turn around now! But he kept quiet as the voices drew near. His cell door shut in his face.
“What’s going on out there?” Boss asked.
Nicolas shrugged and he closed his eyes, listening to Elon’s voice rise in the hall, calling out to the other guards.
When Raymond heard a voice in the hallway a week later, he immediately recognized it as Elon’s.
“Lights out!”
He heard footsteps and waited patiently. The inmates loosened the lightbulb from the socket in the few cells where they worked, and darkness engulfed the prison. Raymond pressed his back against the wall. He felt light-headed.
When the footsteps reached his cell door, Raymond heard keys jingle and then the familiar scratch of a key turning inside a lock. The door opened with a creak, and through the slit, Raymond and the other prisoners who tilted their head at an angle saw Elon’s head peering in.
“Taxi?”
Raymond sprang forward, his muscles twitching with excitement. “I’m here.”
“Step outside.”
Raymond looked back at the other inmates before stepping out into the hallway. He knew there were two or three prisoners who wondered what was happening, but most were just grateful that the guard’s attention wasn’t on them.
The lightbulb in the hallway flickered every five seconds. Raymond counted them off in his head, his bare toes curling against the hot concrete. He looked at Elon as the door shut behind him. The young man was visibly nervous.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Elon whispered. He motioned for Raymond to follow him. “Hurry.”
Raymond looked around. At the end of the empty hall, he saw a bright light under a door and he knew immediately this had to be the guards’ quarters. He could make out chuckles and slams he knew could only come from a game of dominoes. He heard the clatter of bones as the guards shuffled them.
They approached the cell door. Elon waved his hand at Raymond, a gesture of impatience he took as an order to be quiet. Cell six was at the opposite end of the hall from cell two, where Raymond had been kept. They stopped at the door and Elon reached for the keys buried inside his pocket. No one was coming down the hall, but they had to be quick about it. Elon turned the key in the lock. Raymond heard movement inside and imagined the frail prisoners flattening themselves against the wall, panicked by this unexpected intrusion.
“Get in!” Elon said roughly. “You’ve been transferred.”
Raymond held his breath as the guard called for another prisoner.
“You’re moving to a new cell,” he told the man. “Hurry up!”
When the door closed behind him, Raymond was pressed with questions. Who was he? Why was he changing cells?
“I don’t know,” Raymond said. “I just do what I’m told.”
His eyes slowly readjusted to the darkness. Everything was the same: the smell, the squalor, the skeletal frames of men who’d been there too long, the skin sagging from their bones. An old man named Boss pressed him for information. He avoided answering any questions.
Finally, a hand reached out and grabbed him.
Nicolas pulled his brother down onto a mat and they grasped each other’s arms, staring at each other in the dim light, afraid to say anything, but thankful for this small miracle of embracing, something they hadn’t don
e enough when they were out in the world. Despite the lice running through his hair, the scabs and sores accruing over his body, and his hands layered with filth, Nicolas was, for a moment, at peace. They sat like that until the cell was quiet and most prisoners had fallen asleep.
“Why are you here? You could get yourself killed,” Nicolas whispered. He squeezed his brother’s arm. “This is madness. I’m as good as dead.”
“You’re my brother.”
They were silent again. Raymond glimpsed limbs in the shadows, legs and arms searching for space to stretch out. They reminded him of crabs tangled in a fisherman’s basket.
Nicolas hung his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “When you came to the house and I yelled at you. I shouldn’t have said what I did. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things. That book, thinking I could change things. The way I treated you. I shouldn’t have.”
Raymond shook his head. “All of that is past now.”
Nicolas cleared his throat. “What about Yvonne? And the children? How could you leave them?”
Raymond grew cold and lowered his head. “They’re gone.”
“Gone?”
Nicolas’s heart sank as Raymond repeated the word. “Gone. To Miami. They took a raft about two months ago. There’s been no news of them since, so…”
“Oh, Raymond.” Nicolas sighed deeply and listened to Raymond pronounce the words that had been hard for him to share with Eve and Sauveur. Nicolas listened and realized how difficult it must have been for Raymond to swallow this bread of shame. His wife and children had abandoned him.
“I failed them,” he whispered. “I couldn’t do enough, so they left.”
“No,” Nicolas said, resting his hand on his brother’s knee. “You did what you could. This is the world we live in. We’re all churning water hoping to make butter.”
“We’ll get out of here,” Raymond replied. “We’ll get out of here and I will find them.”
He leaned closer to Nicolas and whispered the tale of his own arrest. Nicolas sat in silence, astonished. Raymond felt his brother twitch as he listened to his story.
“You’re right. You are crazy.” Nicolas shook his head, marveling at his brother’s courage. He never would have done it, put in the same position. “I’m so frightened. Jean-Jean is dead. He barely survived a week in here.”
“I’m sorry,” Raymond said after a pause. “But Jean-Jean turned us away when we went to him for help. And the fat one—”
“Georges?”
“Yes. He hid in his closet rather than talk to us. It was pathetic, Nicolas.”
Somewhere near them in the dark, a man murmured prayers.
“I can get us out of any scrape, just like the old days. Okay? We’ll get out of this. But once we are out, we’ll have to run, and run hard. I need you to be prepared for that. You know Cité Simone?”
Nicolas nodded, though he’d never been there himself. Cité Simone’s reputation preceded it. A slum filled with peddlers, street vendors, prostitutes, pimps, charlatans, and swindlers.
“Any other part of Port-au-Prince will be too dangerous. La Saline and Croix des Bossales will already be swarming with Tonton Macoutes. We can hide in the shanties of Cité Simone until we get a chance to get out of Port-au-Prince.”
Nicolas leaned toward Raymond and asked, “But how do we get out?”
Raymond shook his head. “It’s better if you don’t know. We have people on our side.”
“It doesn’t sound like the odds are very good.”
Raymond moved his lips closer to Nicolas’s ear. “Either we die here or we die trying. I’m not going to let Duvalier or Oscar or any one of them kill us, you hear me?”
“What makes you think you can trust these mysterious people? If my friends, people with connections, turned tail and ran, how can these people possibly accomplish the impossible?”
“There is some good left in this world,” he said.
Someone screamed outside the cell door, down the hallway, and the shriek caromed off the walls. Raymond caught his breath and shifted away from Nicolas. More prisoners began to wake.
A crash shuddered through the cell. The prisoners froze, their skin blue black in the faint light. Then a white flash came through the tiny window. Lightning. And more thunder, as loud as if the storm was sitting right on the roof of Fort Dimanche. Then the rain began in earnest. The prisoners shouted in happiness at first, applauding the heavens and running to the small window to see if they could catch a glimpse, but only gusts of petrichor infiltrated the fortress.
Soon, the cell began to steam, and Raymond and Nicolas were soaked as if they’d plunged in a hot bath. Breathing became difficult, and Raymond tried to remain calm as his brother gasped for air. This torrent of rain was speaking to them, Raymond assured him. August was coming. Freedom was near. And Nicolas, in response, coughed the blood out of his lungs.
EIGHTEEN
When he saw Elon the following day, Raymond whispered to him about medicine.
“I think it’s TB, and he says he might have an infection. It burns when he pisses.”
“The doctor won’t come unless it’s payday,” Elon said quickly. “He never sees the prisoners unless the orders come from the warden, and that’s not going to happen.”
Raymond looked at him with imploring eyes.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Elon said.
For three days, Elon managed to remain inconspicuous as he visited Raymond and Nicolas in their cell.
“The doctor sends you these,” Elon said, dropping tiny bags of medicine in the palms of their hands. “It’s what he’s got on-site.”
“But…” Nicolas looked at the pills. “I thought the doctors—”
“The warden knows you’re ill,” Elon replied. “I told him. It was the only way to get you any meds.”
Nicolas and Raymond stared at the guard, dumbfounded.
“He wants you alive,” Elon said, looking down. “Anyway, this is just a stopgap. If you have tuberculosis, these pills won’t help. I’m told what you really need is to be hospitalized and quarantined. That could take months.”
“It’ll have to do for now,” Nicolas said. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
Elon would sometimes bring extra cornmeal and rolls of bread and pass them to Nicolas when the cook came to the door. Boss would stare in dismay, and Nicolas would avoid his gaze. The old man was speaking to him less and less these days. He tried to avoid starting a quarrel. The men in here were already arguing about who would become the next “Major.” Nicolas recoiled at man’s apparent need, even in the face of such horror, to create hierarchies. Some of them were already kissing up to the guards. No matter how sneakily delivered, the medicine and extra food made him unlikable, so he kept to himself.
Nicolas’s coughing diminished within two weeks. He could feel a difference in his body, and he’d started exercising again, following the lead of other inmates in his cell. He found the strength for push-ups and sit-ups, and more often than was wise, Nicolas climbed the tree. But always, the old adage came back to him: What God has in store for you, nothing can take away.
The morning of August twenty-six, Raymond’s eyes scrolled through the list Elon presented him at the door of the cell. It was written in French, so it took him a few minutes to decipher.
Autorisation de liquidation des conspirateurs, 27 Aout 1965. The letter was authorizing Jules Sylvain Oscar to “rid the Republic” of the named plotters by any means necessary. And there, in the mix of all those wretched souls the Macoutes were to slaughter, were their names: Raymond L’Eveillé. Nicolas L’Eveillé. The letter was concluded, in fresh blue ink, with the familiar ornate signature that read Président Duvalier.
Raymond drew a deep breath. He and Nicolas had prepared for this. It was time.
Elon fidgeted with his keys, and he swallowed before looking into Raymond’s eyes.
“It’ll be at midnight. Be ready.”
Elon’s voice cracked, but Raymond pretended no
t to notice. He tried to swallow, but his throat was parched. They heard a creak at the other end of the hall. Elon quickly shut the cell door and locked it. Once he was left in the dark, Raymond turned to his brother.
“Lé a rive.”
But the time came sooner than expected. Long before night had even fallen, the door swung open again to reveal the chief supervisor.
“Brothers L’Eveillé, come with me.”
Nicolas shot his brother a terrified glance, but Raymond only stared at the imposing figure in the door. This was not part of the plan.
The brothers were led to Jules Oscar’s office. The door was open. A man was standing there in a guard’s uniform, facing the warden’s empty desk. Something moved in the corner of the room and Oscar emerged from the shadows, nostrils flaring.
“Step forward,” he ordered. “I won’t bite.”
They shuffled closer and Oscar told the uniformed man to face them. Raymond’s jaw flexed in anguish. Elon gazed at them, his eyes vacant as he swallowed hard. Raymond felt the earth opening beneath him as Oscar stepped closer.
“Do you know this man?” Oscar growled.
Raymond flinched. “I— He’s a guard.”
“How do you know him? You’ve met him before?”
“No, sir,” Raymond said.
“You’re a liar! You’re lying, like you lied that day when you plowed into my car. You’re some sort of vermin spy sent to destroy me.”
Raymond was silent. Oscar walked around them, these three men huddled in the middle of the room in a pitiful triangle. Nicolas kept his head down. Raymond wanted to reach out for him but didn’t. He didn’t dare move. Oscar’s rage permeated everything.
“You don’t think I know what’s going on here?” Oscar stopped next to Elon. “Who authorized you to put them in the same cell?”
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