The Guyana Contract

by Rosalind McLymont

  Tabatha had been kidnapped on her way home from Spain, where she had gone with her head full of dreams about playing with the great American jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Her parents had been close friends of Hampton’s when they lived in the United States and they had arranged for her to meet him. Hampton was in Spain for a brief engagement, and did not want to go to France just yet. He would do so during his European tour scheduled for later that year.

  Tabatha had rushed off excitedly to Madrid where she had indeed met Hampton and even joined him on the piano in an impromptu jamming session at a small nightclub. She had called her parents the moment she had arrived back in France, gushing about the experience and promising to visit them the very next day to tell them all about it. They never saw or heard from her again.

  Theron and Faustin never stopped looking for her. In the process they learned about organized crime groups that had built the smuggling and exploitation of human beings into a multibillion-dollar industry with tentacles on every continent. They learned about the trafficking routes—young girls and women taken from China, Thailand, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia; and from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. And still more from Romania, and Russia.

  The principal destinations for these women and girls were Western Europe and North America, where they were sexually exploited or thrown into forced labor. They rarely made it out alive.

  Theron and Faustin followed every lead, sometimes spending an entire night in the human cesspools that littered the Paris underground. Their efforts eventually paid off in a tip from a heroin addict who was coming down from his high and needed money for another fix. A girl had run away that very night, he said, and the King had sent the one called Eyes to find her. The addict told them that they were saying she had probably run toward the police precinct. They all did that when they ran away and that’s why the King planted men all along that route.

  When Theron and Faustin asked him to describe the girl, he kept pointing at Theron, his mouth slack, his knees sagging. Theron thrust him up against a wall and threatened to kill him if he did not speak. The junkie, protesting loudly, finally blurted out the words that Theron had been praying to hear: “Like you. She looked like you.”

  Tabatha was close to death when they found her. “We called her name. Many times. It was no use. She was already leaving us. But she opened her eyes, saw us, smiled, and then…then she died. She…she simply died,” the writer quoted Theron as saying, even describing the tremor in his voice.

  Dru shuddered as she read the description of Tabatha’s mutilated body. It was the work of an animal. Tabatha had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly and left to die.

  Shortly after the funeral, Theron, embittered by the powerlessness or unwillingness of the authorities to pursue Tabatha’s murderers, launched a vigilante movement against the people who preyed on women. He and his recruits kept watch at the train and bus stations through which thousands of innocent women and girls passed daily, coming from the rural areas of France and from all over Europe, traveling alone on a thrill or a dream. Only a few came like that from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, for those were places where the culture still did not permit women and young girls to travel alone to foreign lands. Those girls were taken in their own countries, sometimes given up by their own families in exchange for money to settle debts or to feed the rest of a starving family.

  The vigilantes quickly learned to recognize the predators, just as the predators quickly learned to recognize the vigilantes. Neither side confronted nor attacked the other. The vigilantes simply formed a protective presence around anyone who fit the profile of a prey and that kept the evil ones away. Women’s rights organizations estimated that hundreds of lives were spared as a result of Theron’s vigilantes. Although these successes on their own were too few to make a dent in the human trade, it was enough for the right people to take notice and shame the French authorities into action. Funds were hastily allocated for a specially trained squad of undercover police to be assigned exclusively to terminals and ports. Shortly after that, a coalition of women’s groups from countries in the European Union presented Theron with the first “Tabatha Award.” It was an honor that, from then on, would be bestowed annually on a deserving individual.

  Dru took a deep breath and closed the file. She could not sleep that night, thinking about all that she had said and done to hurt Theron St. Cyr, when all he had ever done was try to keep her safe.

  19

  Roopnaraine stuffed the last piece of roti into his mouth, licked his fingers and leaned back in his chair with a contented sigh.

  He had been craving a good hassa curry for weeks and Jean, his wife, had finally prepared it for him. More precisely, the maid had prepared it. The maid was much better with curry than Jean could ever hope to be, though Roopnaraine didn’t dare tell Jean so.

  Not that Jean was bad herself. Every Guyanese woman knew how to make a decent curry. After all, curry was a national dish. But Jean’s curry just didn’t have the kick that comes from the right combination of garlic and achar, the spicy pickled green mango. Still, he had pestered her about cooking curry hassa until she snapped back that it was easier to find hassa on Liberty Avenue in Queens or at Bacchus shop in Brooklyn than in Georgetown. The closest place to G.T. where you could find it was tillaway up the East Coast, in the Corentyne region, she had argued heatedly. “So if you know somebody in Berbice who could send you some hassa, Nelson, or if you got somebody in Brooklyn or Queens up dere in New York, you go ‘long and ask dem to send it. And once dey send it, Nelson, I will cook it.”

  Jean had made this statement in a very reasonable voice, but with that emphatic inflection on the words “Nelson” and “New York” that spelled danger. Nelson had retaliated with the surest and safest tactic he knew—silence. And Jean hated not being spoken to. Nelson had kept it up for two whole days before she herself relented and telephoned a friend in Berbice. As if he, Nelson, didn’t know that the friend was an old boyfriend he had run off, but who seized every opportunity to let Jean know that the flame she had lit in his heart all those years ago would glow within him “like de star o’ Bethlehem” until he went to his grave.

  Hoping for a little play-play when Nelson was not at home, the ex-boyfriend told Jean that on his next trip to G.T., which just happened to be the very next morning, he would stock her up with several pounds of the best hassa in Guyana.

  Hassa was a strange-looking crustacean, no bigger than a croaker, with a dark, vertebrae-like carapace. Guyanese lobster, Jamaicans jokingly called it. And indeed, once it was cooked, the shell was easily pulled away, leaving a length of succulent, yellowish meat that was lobsterlike in consistency. Ex-boyfriend and fish had arrived as promised. Jean hurried him away as soon as he handed over the bundle and made Sundrawattie, the maid, swear that she would not breathe a word to Mr. Roopnaraine about who delivered it. “Just tell him you didn’t see when it came, you hear, Sundrow’tie?”

  The aroma of curry hit Roopnaraine and Dalrymple at the gate as they arrived for lunch. Roopnaraine made a beeline for the kitchen as soon as he entered the house and uncovered the pot on the stove. Were it not for Dalrymple’s scornful remarks about how stupid some people carried on when they saw food, not to mention Sundrawattie covering her face and giggling, he would have seriously humped Jean right there in the kitchen in gratitude. He settled for an exuberant embrace and a handful of Jean’s bottom.

  Just as Nelson had done, Dalrymple leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach. “Boy, I got to hand it to Jean. This is really good food. I don’t know the last day I had hassa. They exporting every damn thing to America now, talking about how much money they making. Everything is for America! America! America! Like if Guyana don’t have people living here. Like if we mustn’t eat. Like if we can’t pay for food. Even labba heading for America. Labba! That nasty rat-meat! I see it with my own two eyes at Bacchus shop. I tell you, Nello, for me one-one, I wo
uld leave all dem Yankee Guyanese to punish up there with spaghetti and meatball. If they want to live in America they should learn to eat American food. You don’t agree with me, Nello? Why should they have it bake and cake?” Roopnaraine had heard this all before. He kept his eyes closed and remained silent. Dalrymple sighed and called out to Jean. “Aye, Jean! Put some of that hassa in a bowl for me to carry home, gyurl. And wrap up two roti with it.”

  Jean sucked her teeth. “Does my house look like a restaurant to you, Compton Dalrymple? Why don’t you ask that buck woman you’re cheating on your wife with to cook curry hassa and roti for you!” The pot cover clattered and Jean addressed her husband. “Nelson, when you miss me I gone.”

  They heard the kitchen door slam, followed by Jean’s three-inch heels clip-clopping on the driveway as she headed to her car. She was taking an afternoon class in computer programming at one of the private technical schools that were springing up all over the city.

  Roopnaraine sat up, laughing. “Eh heh! See what I told you? The whole of Georgetown know your business. Jean vex like mad about it and not she alone. Anyway, don’t worry ‘bout de roti an’ curry. Sundrawattie gon tek care o’ yuh. But you better straighten out your business fast, man.”

  “All right! All right! Leave that alone. Let’s get back to the matter at hand,” Dalrymple said, flicking his wrist and switching to straight English. “As I was saying on our way here, this business with Livuh is nasty business. I vote we cut loose from the contract with Pilgrim Boone. Find a way to ease ourselves out of it without anybody losing face. I just don’t want anybody looking at us funny, pointing fingers and making remarks. I don’t want my name called in no murder business.”

  “But is there any real proof that it was murder?”

  “What more proof do you want? You already put two and two together but you just don’t want to admit that you got four. Come on, Nello. A big, healthy, strapping man like Livuh drops dead out of the blue. The man used to jog and he wasn’t no young yam. Everybody knows there was no love lost between him and the Savoy people. I tell you, somebody put out that man’s light. What’s wrong with you, man? Besides, if the minister says it’s so, it’s so.”

  Roopnaraine leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. He let a moment pass before he spoke. “Nobody in his right mind would think we had anything to do with it, Compton. People know us.”

  “I know people know us. But a lot of those same people are jealous of us. Remember what some of them said when we got our first contract with Pilgrim Boone? How the only reason we got it was because you let Grant

  Featherhorn go down on Jean. Remember?”

  Roopnaraine scowled at the recollection. It had not taken them long to figure out where the rumor had originated. But word of it, and the name of its author, had gotten back to Jean before either of them could say or do anything about it, and she decided to take matters into her own hands. She never asked her husband or Dalrymple if they had heard the rumor, although, she admitted later, she assumed both had.

  The opportunity for revenge presented itself sooner than she expected, at a frou-frou reception at the American ambassador’s residence to celebrate America’s Independence Day.

  Knowing how much Fenton Latchman was in awe of the United States, Jean deliberately wrangled an invitation for him. Without making it seem obvious, she sought him out at the reception, and, hooking her arm amiably through his, she laughed and joked with him until he felt comfortable enough to confess to her that he would give anything to be personally introduced to the ambassador. Yes, he had shaken the ambassador’s hand on the greeting line, but that didn’t count, he argued. The greeting line was just a polite formality, and the ambassador most likely had already forgotten his name. He simply had to make an impression on the man who represented the most powerful nation on earth. He couldn’t come so close, eating and drinking in the ambassador’s pryvit residence, and leave without stamping the name and face of Fenton Latchman indelibly on his mind.

  Besides, it was getting harder and harder to get a visa to America without the right connections. What better connection than the ambassador himself ?

  Latchman told Jean that he had seen her exchange warm greetings with the ambassador as if they were good friends. He did not know, and she did not tell him, that she had met the ambassador just the previous week, at a small ceremony marking his donation of several boxes of books to the National Library, where she worked as a librarian.

  Feigning reluctance, Jean led Latchman over to the ambassador, who, it so happened, was speaking to a group that included Nelson, Dalrymple, and the American deputy consul general. She refused to look at Nelson, knowing that he had already guessed she was up to no good when he saw her arm in arm with Latchman.

  With the most innocent smile, Jean introduced Latchman to the ambassador as “one of Guyana’s leading businessmen.” She paused only briefly before she went in for the kill, her expression cold and hard. “And, Excellency, Mr. Latchman also happens to be the man who has the distinction of single-handedly compromising the integrity of one of America’s most venerable consulting firms, Pilgrim Boone.”

  “Oh?” the ambassador said, looking intently at Latchman, ignoring his extended hand. “And how did Mr. Latchman accomplish such a feat?”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure you want to know the sordid details, Mr. Ambassador. Suffice it to say that Mr. Latchman has come to regret his, shall we say, his error in judgment?” Jean’s voice was pure honey. She was enjoying herself.

  Latchman stood like idiocy personified. His unshaken hand was still extended toward the ambassador, his face frozen in a foolish grin.

  Dalrymple and Roopnaraine, who had given up trying to catch his wife’s eye in hopes of staving her off, shifted nervously from one foot to another and tinkled the ice in their glasses. The deputy consul general cocked his head and looked amused. He was a man in his thirties who had won notoriety throughout Guyana for his adulation of the Guyanese personality with the words “that truly delightful spirit, that inimitable verve, so singularly Guyanese.” Those words, spoken in a televised interview, had earned him the moniker “Inimitable.”

  The ambassador smiled icily at Latchman and addressed Jean. “Well, now, Mrs. Roopnaraine, you’ve aroused my curiosity tremendously. Please don’t spare me the sordid details.”

  Jean inclined her head graciously. “If you insist, Mr. Ambassador.” Latchman’s face crumpled. His unshaken hand finally fell to his side and he whispered frantically to Jean, “Ow, Mistress. Don’t do me so. Mi wicket down a’ready.”

  “Come to think of it, I do remember hearing an ugly rumor about that contract,” the ambassador said suddenly, before Jean had a chance to continue. “Yes, indeed I do. I had not yet arrived in Guyana, of course, but it was such a vile piece of gossip that the American community here still mentions it from time to time. Naturally, word of it got to me soon after I came. Now, Mrs. Roopnaraine, are you saying that Mr. Latchman here is the one who started that rumor? Then I am sure there is some mistake. Didn’t you say Mr. Latchman was one of Guyana’s most important businessmen? Surely someone of such standing could not stoop so low. Someone must have twisted his words into that unspeakable accusation, isn’t that so, Mr. Latchman?”

  Latchman lost no time darting through the opening the ambassador provided. “So it is, Mr. Ambassador. And in front of all of you, I apologize to Mrs. Roopnaraine for any pain caused by those wicked allegations.”

  “Your apology is accepted, Mr. Latchman,” Jean said triumphantly. “Good. Now what were you saying, Mr. Dalrymple?” the ambassador asked, turning his back to Latchman.

  By the next day, the entire business community had heard of the scene at the ambassador’s residence and from then on, Latchman had been nicknamed “Wicket Down.”

  Roopnaraine dragged his thoughts back to the present. “So who do you think killed him, Compton? You think Dru knows anything?”

  “Nah. But I think this Theron St. Cyr that she and Macky
were talking about knows something. Remember him? The fella at the airport? The one she was staring at with greedy eyes?”

  “Oh, yes! She and Macky were talking about him? Why?”

  “She so much as told Macky he was the one who killed Goodings. But Macky looked like he didn’t believe her one bit. In fact, he looked like he was more sorry for her than anything else. By the way, you know a man named Alejandro Bernat?”

  “Alejandro Bernat? Alejan—you sure Bernat is the last name?”

  “Yes. Why? You know the name?”

  “I heard something just the other day about a Alejandro. Alejandro something or other. It sounded like Bernat. But this Alejandro I heard about is supposed to be some big-time drug lord in Venezuela. Killing Guyanese youth over there left and right, I hear. He couldn’t be the same person you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t know what this Alejandro Bernat does. But Bernat is the name I heard plain and straight. Nobody said anything about Venezuela, though. But then again, Alejandro is a Spanish name. Guyanese people don’t name their children Alejandro. Where did you hear about this Alejandro and this business about drugs?”

  Roopnaraine’s belly was full and he was ready to tell a good tale. They had an hour yet before they would return to the office. He settled himself more comfortably in his chair, stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles, and locked his fingers behind his head.

  “I was having drinks at The Lib’ry the other day with those boys from the Rupununi. You know who I’m talking about? The two who came to see us about finding a foreign investor for their farm project. Remember them? They said they didn’t trust Guyanese. They called Guyanese people thieves. Said Guyanese would rob them blind before they could blink. By the way, don’t forget you’re supposed to call Willo in New York about their project. He said he had one or two leads, remember? Anyway, after two drinks—you know those people can’t hold their liquor—these boys started talking about their escapades in Venezuela. You know how they cross the border like they’re going from G.T. to Vreed-en-Hoop. Anyway, they started talking about how hard life was for some of them over in Venezuela. How all these young Guyanese suddenly got mixed up with drugs after they went to work for this man named Alejandro something. Big helluva ranch this man has, they said. The name sounded like Bernat, but I could be wrong. They said he even had a Guyanese mistress at one time. One beautiful buck girl. Young. She was only a teenager when he took her. But he turned that little girl into something so nasty it killed her poor mother and father. Kill dem dead. This Alejandro apparently is a real big shot in Venezuela. He’s supposed to be friends with all kinds of army and government people. But all the poor people know he’s a big-time drug lord. Coke, what else? Runs the whole operation from his ranch. Dem Rupununi boys said planes fly in there all the time, even in broad daylight. But this Alejandro keeps a fancy office in Caracas with a cover-up business. Something to do with building hotels. But as for the ranch, those boys said every single worker who ever left ended up dead. And every last one of them was Guyanese. They know all this from crossing the border to sell gold.”