by Brian Hodge
Hence the declaration of bankruptcy for Carrefour Imports. No other choice, cash flow had stopped dead in its tracks. The bulk of investment had gone into launching Caribe, and given that it was a new product, there was no brand loyalty yet. It wasn’t as if he could swallow the loss and put more product out, flood the market with coupons to seduce the buyers back. Such a strategy had helped Tylenol years before, after its own cyanide scare, but Tylenol could afford it, while Carrefour could not. To the consumer and the business communities alike, he was a pariah.
Bankruptcy had been the only self-defense left. And now? Chains and locks were on the doors of his plant on the fringe of the city, and Carrefour Imports had spewed nearly two hundred workers toward the unemployment lines.
His heart ached for them, but even more so for those with whom he had done business back in Haiti. The Arabica coffee growers, the collectives that harvested the fruit and rice and sugar he imported. There was the real loss. In his business there was self-interest, to be sure. He was no saint. If you grew up in reasonable privilege in a country with 80 percent unemployment, where the average peasant earned just a few hundred dollars a year, where a porter carrying a sixty-kilo bag of coffee beans fifteen miles to the coast was paid a dollar for his journey, then you appreciated the power of money as well as anyone.
Christophe Granvier’s family had come into its own in decades past, fourth-generation son on a coffee plantation in the Haitian hills to the southeast of Port-au-Prince. Peasant stock, though, with dark skin, not like the mulatto elite who thought themselves superior for their French ancestry. The Granviers had prospered during the American occupation early in the century, and while they were landowners, they knew they were no better than the lowest of the porters. Just luckier.
Haiti was a nation like none other. The western third of an island found by Christopher Columbus and named Hispaniola, it was first settled by the Spanish, who systematically exterminated the native Arawak Indian population. The Spanish colonials needed a labor force for their gold mines and sugar plantations, and they imported slaves from Africa. French colonization began to dominate by the late 1600s, and in just over two centuries, slaves both imported and born on the island outnumbered their white masters and their families by as many as eighteen to one. Revolution was inevitable, and began in earnest in 1791. Thirteen bloody years later, they won their independence. It was the only successful slave revolt in world history, and Haiti the only nation of its kind.
Christophe Granvier was not alone in his view that this had set the stage for the whole of Haitian history to come; they had never been truly stable. Bereft of oppressors, the victorious freemen and women were left without a system of government. What had arisen in the countryside had been a kind of feudalism where landowners controlled a province, with illiterate peasants in the role of serfs, and the ruling family often paying off the local military to make sure they remained in power. These land barons frequently sent their children to France or the United States for their schooling, all the better to serve the family and the status quo upon their return.
But Christophe’s father, Phillipe Granvier, like his father before him, had no heart to rule the local peasantry with an iron fist. They weren’t long out of the fields and hovels themselves, and remembered everything. The dirt. The flies. The labor that broke backs, bowed legs, ground spirits into dust like a boot upon the throat.
Christophe Granvier returned to Haiti as a young man with a degree from Notre Dame, and even then, with a much wider view of the world, he still respected the peasants the most. Theirs were simple ways, with superstitions to fill every event of the day, but they were real. Christophe had met the aristocracy on its own ground, the mulattoes who skimmed fortunes from the treasury, who lived like royalty in Port-au-Prince, and he saw them for the parasites they were. On an international level, Port-au-Prince was essentially useless. Whatever economic pittance Haiti contributed to the world economy came solely from the sweat of peasants: sugarcane, coffee, rice. Too few understood that.
The Granviers tried, for all the good it did. For when the end of this young dynasty came, where was the peasantry they had so championed?
Running for cover.
Ancient history.
Friday evening, when the brass knocker sounded insistently at his door, Christophe was expecting no one. He answered, found a young couple. Dark-haired, the both of them, vague Asian tracery in the woman’s face when viewed from certain angles … and trouble came in twos, did it not? He knew at a glance they were paying no friendly visit. He had learned long ago to recognize desperation in the eyes.
“You’re Christophe Granvier?” the man asked, and he said that he was. The man offered his hand, they shook. Introduced himself as Justin Gray, and she, his wife April. “Can we come in?”
Better judgment said no, but that would be rude, and so he stepped aside. Let them into the side hail, and then he ushered them into the front room. Tropical decor, a holdover from the Caribbean. They sat on a cushioned wicker divan, and he upon a large thronelike wicker chair. He waited; the last to speak had the greatest chance to think.
“I work for an ad agency down in Tampa,” Justin told him. “A few months ago it was my job to look at you and think of you as the enemy, I guess, is the best way of putting it. I’m the one that did the ads for Magnolia Blossom.”
He said it with such strange inflection, almost like a confession, and Christophe smiled broadly. “So you’re the one. I enjoyed those … very much, in fact. I found them quite clever.”
Justin was clearly taken aback. “I was the competition. I was the one supposed to make people forget all about you when you hit the shelves.”
Christophe held his palms up, hands wide. “And we’ll never know if it would have worked, will we?”
Justin shook his head, slow. “No. We won’t.” Biting his lip, then, and he dropped one hand to the woman’s side, fumbled for her hand and gripped it tight.
“Go ahead,” she told him. “It’ll never get any easier.”
Justin stared at the floor for a moment, the polished gleam of hardwood. “I know who sabotaged you.”
And on went the tale, Justin Gray telling the bulk of it, April adding details, clarifications. A tale of information stolen from the Carrefour offices, right out from under him, apparently, then used against him. Of Dorcilus Fonterelle these two knew next to nothing — they had neither seen nor heard him. Not even a man anymore, by the end, but a thing controlled by another. These two whites — blancs, in the Creole tongue — did they even have the capacity to understand what had happened to Fonterelle? Could they even believe? It was frightening business, one that took him home and tapped into regions of the mind all but forgotten. Dark tales, dreaded mountain and countryside legend, those who were once human left with no will of their own. To the descendants of slaves, to whom death was anticipated as sweet release, there could be no worse fate than to remain a slave after death.
But slaves had masters, and if Justin Gray had done anything, he had confirmed suspicion. For all the good it did.
“Why do you bring this to me?” Christophe asked.
“I first tried taking it to the police. It was like beating my head against a brick wall, they didn’t want to listen, they just want to leave it a closed case. No proof, they say.”
“And you think I can do more than the police?”
Justin fanned the computer disk and folded paper before him like a card player with his hand. “What about your lawyers, if you gave them these? They’d know a lot more what to do with them than we would.”
April leaned forward. “We don’t know anybody else in New Orleans. Nobody that we’d feel comfortable turning these over to. You’re in a better position for that than we are.”
Christophe could feel the beginnings of a headache, dull and deep, pulsing in sync with his heart.
“I did some looking into Andrew Mullavey’s background,” she went on. “It doesn’t take much to see that he’s g
ot at least the availability of a criminal connection. His own brother.”
Christophe shook his head, offered a smile to them, small and wistful. What must it have been like for them, growing up in this country? Haitians and Americans alike could grow up to believe in ideals, but of the two, only Americans could retain such idealism past early childhood. Beautifully naïve, endearingly stubborn. He preferred not to think of them as merely stupid.
“There is no need,” he said. “You can go home, and know that you tried. And I thank you for coming.”
They stared at him for a moment, and Justin blinked, his eyebrows pinching together in a mystified frown. He raised the disk and paper a bit higher. “You don’t even want these?”
“There is no need.” He shrugged. “But I will accept them, if it makes you feel better.”
Justin let his hand fall heavily to his side. Looked at his wife, then back at Christophe, then off into empty air. “I don’t believe this, I don’t fucking believe this.” He slapped his handful down onto the glass-topped table before the divan. “They used you to kill five people, whose worst crime was wanting a fast cup of coffee. And you don’t want to do anything about that?”
Christophe sighed, massaged his temples to try to mold the growing headache into submission. He rose from his chair. If a simple glimpse into the world from which he’d come — and which had come back to crush him — would help dissuade these two, then it was his duty to provide it.
“Come with me,” he said quietly. “I have something I must show you.”
He led them into the side hail, to the back of the house. He flipped on an outside light, then continued through the rear door and down the steps. His backyard was small, always gloomy in the evening, oaks spreading a canopy to thwart the moon. Shadows and secrets of night lived here, like his own small patch of homeland.
They stood around a plastic garbage can, and Christophe raised the lid. He pulled out a sealed plastic bag bulging with something soft and limp, and raised it into the light.
“That’s a … a dead chicken,” April said flatly.
“Yes. Most of one.”
He held it before them, back and forth, let each get a good long look. Let them see, and sense mysteries undreamed of. Let them know it was not a matter for their concern, and never could be.
A white cockerel, its feathers slick and ragged with the coming of decomposition. Its head had been wrenched to kill it, and its left wing had been sliced cleanly away with a blade. Then its gullet stuffed to overflowing with roasted coffee beans.
Their hush was uneasy, and prolonged, and just what he wanted to see.
“Yesterday was four weeks to the day since my coffee poisoned those who bought it. And I received this in a package yesterday, in the mail. There was of course no return address, there was no need of one. He let me wonder for a month who was responsible … and then sends this. Its message was plain enough for me.”
“Is that … voodoo?” Justin said.
“No. It’s a dead chicken.” Christophe smiled at him, almost laughed. Put a dead animal in a Haitian’s hand, the blanc sees ritual sacrifice. “It means nothing, only what its sender means for it to say. He could have sent a broken doll, or a picture from a magazine with one arm cut away, and the meaning would have been just the same.” He waggled the plastic bag, then tossed it unceremoniously back into the trash, replaced the lid. “It is a shout from someone I last saw years ago. His way of telling me he is responsible. It is no more and no less than that…
“The police see Dorcilus Fonterelle and him alone. You see Andrew Jackson Mullavey and his brother, Nathan Forrest. But I see slave and slavemasters. You and the police, neither of you are wrong. But I know that there must be one who pays the slavemaster. One who is above the law because he is the one who makes the law.”
Christophe began to steer them toward the house again, and they went without protest, with only confusion. That was all right. More lives were saved by confusion than were lost.
“For the people who died? I wept. For the sadness that was caused? I wept. For all the people who lost their jobs? I wept. For myself, I wept too. It is not that I wish to do nothing about what was done to me, and to them. It is that I know nothing can bring them back, and nothing I can do can bring those responsible to any justice they would understand.”
Justin Gray, at the first step up to the back door, turned around and looked him in the face. “So you’re giving up.”
“No,” he said. “I am already beaten.”
Chapter 20
Les Cochons Sans Poils
There was something undeniably thrilling about cuckolding a man in his own bedroom, while he was away. You wondered if, later, once he was here with his wife, in solitude, she thought of him or of you. Eel wasn’t given to flattering himself, but in this case, he didn’t think too much of the competition.
Then again, it was the other’s ring she continued to wear.
Unclothed, the both of them, a single sheet draped across them in loosely errant folds. Her bed too cramped for two, at least when they lay side by side. With one or the other on top, they never noticed.
And how long would they last, he and this woman curled on her side and molded into his own, how long could they last? Sweaty afternoon couplings while the sun burned high, and every trickle from a heated brow was gravid with the taste of risk. He didn’t know — nor did she, probably — how much was genuine attraction and how much was seductive flirtation with fate. So different, so very different; if two distinct worlds were ever in collision, then this was it. They both had their needs, and if each was satisfied, then Eel was inclined to think it a happy accident.
Though, in his own way, he supposed he did love her.
He turned onto his side, brushed a soft golden lock from the corner of Evelyn Mullavey’s eye, and she smiled.
“I want to ask you something,” Eel said. “Don’t think of it as coming from me. Think of it as coming from anybody you might know well enough to confess to.”
“All right.” She ran one hand along his inner thigh. White on white; she didn’t get out in the sun much, by choice. “I’m listening.”
“What kind of future do you see for yourself? Under this roof. Where do you see it leading?”
Evelyn opened her mouth a moment to say something, shut it just as quickly. That gentle face clouding for a terrible moment of contemplation. Meeting his eyes then, and her own were haunted by lonely ghosts of desolation.
“I don’t see anything,” she said. “I don’t look that far anymore, Terrance. I gave that up a long time ago. When I found that it hurt too much.”
“What did you see then?” When she wasn’t there with an answer he went on. “A hunchbacked old woman with her soul dying of starvation? Shuffling around a huge house while it falls apart around her?” He let the imagery sink in, and in her grew a vague tension that he savored. Cruelty for its own sake was rarely a treat; employed for a higher purpose, it could be nectar. “Not a very comforting picture, is it?”
She wouldn’t answer, could not, her eyes — blue-green and striking — brimming with tears Evelyn would never allow to fall. He caught all the subtle nuances of the battle going on inside her: the jut in her chin, the twitch of her lower lip. And knew that, in the moment, at least, she hated him. Kill the messenger, prophets often went reviled. She knew he was right.
“You could climb into your car and keep driving,” he said.
“And go where?” Her voice had grown husky. “And do what?”
Eel slipped one arm behind his head, turned to stare into the ceiling. “We’re born with certain … abilities. Potentials. We’re full of dormant aptitudes. But if courage isn’t one of them, the others are lost.” Rolling his head on the pillow to stare at her. “You’ll never know until you take the first steps. I did, once. It was … a revelation.”
These afternoon trysts were infrequent, on no schedule, and he had known before they’d even begun last year that Evelyn’s marr
iage was essentially a trophy of respectability for her husband. He had no illusions that she felt no love at all for the man; she did. That Andrew Jackson Mullavey loved her was not at doubt, either. But Evelyn was an inherently practical woman who recognized reality’s cold stare. While a marriage could not survive stagnation, neither could its heart survive evolution out of sync. Mullavey’s love for her had become something quite different than that which had led him down the aisle. Love had become a kind of deification for this mother of his children. Evelyn the pure, Evelyn the Madonna. Twin beds had entered this room fourteen years ago, and his carnal attentions had dwindled in frequency ever since. According to Evelyn, it had been four years since they’d last made love.
Eel had caught much of this from Nathan, who regarded his brother’s Madonna fixation with appreciative hilarity. Who would have guessed it, Andrew made impotent by the thought of his own wife.
That she chose to stay with him, Eel found appalling, although he understood. The risk of sweeping generalizations aside, Southern women — those of true heritage and lineage — simply were different, their decisions still relying to a greater degree than their Northern counterparts on the opinion of polite society and family and archaic notions of loyalty under fire. They hated admitting defeat, and a broken marriage was just such an admission.
While Evelyn was fundamentally no different, she at least fought back in clandestine fashion. Eel knew he wasn’t the first. She had given cryptic hints that she’d taken at least one prior lover. Place in line meant nothing, he was quite satisfied that he was by far the one whom Mullavey — should he ever learn of Evelyn’s fallen Madonna status— would find the most horrifying. He’d met her last year at Charbonneau’s, after years of hearing Nathan chortle about A. J. and the pedestal he kept for his wife. One prolonged bout of eye contact was all that was needed to set the fuse smoldering, and the profound discomfort she exhibited Andrew had no doubt dismissed as her purity’s reaction to the kind of man Eel was. And it may well have been, in part, but surely this ambience of veiled threat was part of the appeal. Evelyn had played the part of the good girl and dutiful wife for too long. Eel invented an excuse to ride out to Twin Oaks a few days after their first meeting, and their destinies had been entwined at once.
