Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  “First, we sit with Anne and your friend Siri. All of you tell me we’re four equal partners and that I had nothing—as in zero—to do with Barlow and Dave betraying you. Then you tell me who the Gryphon is—”

  “I told you.”

  “No. ‘Trafficker’ is not gonna be enough. This guy’s got the reach of an Old Testament villain.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re in, whether you like it or not, and so am I. And so are Anne and Siri.”

  “This airport has planes to lots of places.”

  Silence, then, “He’s a modern-era warlord—cocaine, slavery, currency, human organs—and as bad as I’ve ever encountered. Anywhere. The only black box in this hemisphere other than Guantanamo—”

  “Black box?”

  “A secure, deniable site where governments can do black business . . . interrogations, red market, and worse; stuff that a Western person can’t fathom.”

  “Red market?”

  “Most of the third world is worth more as bones, blood, and especially organs. Those who aren’t are sold as slaves—sex, labor, or soldiers. Google ‘red market.’”

  I recheck O’Hare Airport to my left and right. “The poem has coordinates.”

  “Tell me it’s not Haiti.”

  “Jamaica.”

  Susie yells: “Yes!”

  I jerk the phone from my ear, recover, say, “Good news, huh?” and hold the phone away.

  Susie Devereux, gunfighter, black-candle palera, says: “Fucking Christmas.”

  “Meet you at Anne’s?”

  The call goes silent.

  “Susie? You there?”

  “Anne was right, you are a man worth knowing. That clue’s our life, Bill; keep it and you safe until I can get there and guard you proper.”

  “I’ll feel safer if you wear the pirate outfit.”

  ***

  2:00 p.m.

  I’m seven hours gone from Chicago O’Hare—thank you, Baby Jesus—buckled into a coach seat on United’s flight 622 to Kingston. Did the plane change in Newark ninety minutes ago. No Chicago police warrant greeted me. Unfortunately, neither did New Jersey’s Springsteen or Debbie Harry. Nor was my swashbuckling pirate girl there to protect me from the rubber airport pizza that people on the East Coast must think is pizza because it’s flat and red.

  Window glance.

  I am, with substantial trepidation, about to remeet the West Indies. My reunion will have Anne and Susie D. in it, but will likely be 100 percent downhill from there. JOLT. United 622 bucks hard, buffeted in the first of two storm systems churning in from the Atlantic. We’re over central Cuba, rolling the dice above hurricane alley—“kissing the serpent’s tale,” as the vodou mambos used to say; the same mambos who told me in 1986: “Never, ever come back.”

  Lightning rips across the windows.

  United 622 flat-falls, jolts hard, then bucks higher. The cabin lights flash off-on-off. Twenty-three goddamn years; the West Indies and the Corazón Santo haven’t changed. Both still kill a lot of people in September, many of them innocent. And dying down here isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you.

  FLASH. JOLT. FLASH.

  My knuckles grip white. Sweat drips into my left eye. I’m breathing in bursts. Goddammit, why did I think I could come back?

  Both eyes squeeze shut.

  Because Bill fucking Owens is a suicidal idiot, running from someone else’s disaster.

  Just like the last time.

  Port-au-Prince, Haiti

  1986

  Chapter 14

  Bill Owens

  February 4

  As the lion tamers say, “What could go wrong?”

  My fellow passengers and I crowd the aisle to deplane our DC-8 from Kingston. I share my sunniest twenty-two-year-old smile. We descend rollaway stairs onto the cloudy and humid two-country Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The newbies balk at the visual—submachine guns, sunglasses, military caps—then the smell: a Detroit factory on a three-shift day.

  Hispaniola is a troubled “paradise” currently awash in Colombian cocaine, DEA agents, and Miami Vice wannabes, although that’s mostly on the Dominican Republic half. The Haiti side has a different set of troubles.

  I, however, am not a party to the troubles on either side of the island, nor do I dress, talk, or look like I’m a party to those troubles. I sell Jamaican rum. Call me Bob Marley in a bottle. This is not completely clear to the raptor-eyed customs officer representing the République d’Haiti’s half of the island.

  On a good day, François Duvalier International Airport’s customs and immigration isn’t fun. And with armed rebellion already killing people in Haiti’s eastern mountains, the prospects for foreign arrivals are . . . well, you can imagine. (The rebels want a Cuban-Communist utopia, not the hellish “democracy” of President-for-Life Bébé Doc Duvalier.) And had I taken the time to “imagine,” I wouldn’t be here with a hidden agenda. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen; I know better.

  The customs officer rereads my US passport a third time. His accent is French: “William Lyman Owens, born Chicago, Illinois.” He looks up from behind his metal table and stares round-eyed, third-world authority. “This passport is counterfeit. You are a drug trafficker. Here to finance the rebels.”

  “No. No. No. See, right there.” I point my most confident fingertip at previous Haiti stamps and visas, all legitimate. “I come here all the time. For Myers’s Rum. From Jamaica. I live in Kingston, see? Moved from London. It’s on the other pages.”

  I don’t mention the reason for the move—East London’s twin-brother crime bosses Ronnie and Reggie Kray want to kill me for refusing to dope horses they’d bet against. I point to my Myers’s order book, then to the Myers’s Rum bottles that the uniformed officers have removed from my suitcase. All the customs people have added pistols to their light-blue uniforms in the seven weeks since my last trip.

  The officer growls: “Why are you here?”

  “To sell rum. Like always. I have a meeting with our new distributor; he’s waiting at the Oloffson, the hotel. You can call.”

  He barks Haitian Kreyol, Haiti’s slave-era patois of African and sugar-plantation French. A junior officer steps up, takes my passport, and disappears into the airport’s noise and confusion. I will myself to not think about Carel Roos, Rhodesian mercenary. Business meeting. Business meeting. Business meeting. That’s why I’m here.

  Sweat beads on my forehead. Carel once told me a good operator could smell a revolution coming. He’d been part of several in Africa and mentioned the smell again last week when he called me in Kingston to make me this offer.

  STOP. You’re here for legitimate business, rum business, same as always.

  I glance beyond my interrogation table into the open-air terminal that I haven’t been allowed to enter. Would be bad if Haiti’s already-rattled authorities have a record of Carel’s call to me. Swallow. Very, very bad.

  Straight ahead in the terminal, watching me from either side of a dirty-tile support column, are two black men in ratty sport coats, porkpie hats, and sunglasses. Pistol grips are prominent in their belts. They are freelance street militia. President-for-Life Bébé Doc Duvalier’s Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale. Successors to his dead father’s horror show Tontons Macoutes. Same show; different name. To whom the Volontaires will be loyal in the coming weeks is up for grabs.

  The junior customs officer with my passport struts past the Volontaires without comment and back into the interrogation area. He hands my passport to his boss, who explains nothing, points me to repack my suitcase and pass into the République d’Haiti.

  “Thanks.” I accept my passport, stuff my suitcase, wishing I’d been sent back to the plane. My decision to muck about in Carel’s world felt a lot less ominous on the phone.

  Behind their mirrored sunglasses, the two Volonta
ires bend their necks like tree snakes do when they intend to interdict your path. I’ve had previous encounters with Volontaires and look down to shuffle my documents, pretending I’m foreign-white oblivious to the rebellion tension vibrating off the walls.

  Outside, under François Duvalier International Airport’s porte cochere, it’s ten degrees hotter. My shirt collar steams to my neck.

  Tense soldiers stand the outdoor arrival area. Bayonets glare in the sunlight. Armored concrete checkpoints block any vehicle’s approach to, or exit from, the terminal.

  Per Carel’s instructions, I make a mental note of locations, equipment, and personnel. Under the porte cochere, I switch hands on my Samsonite suitcase and sidestep through soldiers who make no effort to create a lane for passengers and luggage.

  At the curb, I catch the eye of a private-taxi driver, then slide in the back of his bedraggled ’71 Ford Fairlane.

  “S’il vous plaît; Hotel Oloffson.” A heart wrapped in thorns hangs from his mirror, a “graven image” of the Corazón Santo.

  We inch up to the exit checkpoint. My driver’s brown hand drops part of the fare he will earn into the ranking soldier’s palm. The soldier stares at me too long, then bends and stares inside the taxi. Still looking at me, the soldier makes a gesture behind his back that I can’t see.

  Another soldier raises the rusted-white pipe barrier and allows us through. The Fairlane coughs forward past two stalled or abandoned Fiats, then out onto the Mais Gate road.

  My driver checks the soldiers in his mirror, then me.

  My heart rate drops to 150.

  We turn right, burrowing through clouds of black flies breeding in the mud fields between us and Cité Simone-Cité Soleil—according to Kingston TV and radio, the most dangerous ghetto/city on earth.

  At the first roundabout, we turn left to skirt the angry crush of Port-au-Prince. I’m sweating lots more than usual and now smell as strong as my driver and his taxi. He, like everyone who sets foot in this country, is wary all the time. The constant menace cooks a peculiar smell, stronger now with Rebelyon coming. The locals call the smell “poor man’s perfume”—the Duvaliers’ thirty years of night terror and murder mixed with the local staple of pepper & pig-fat rice. The tropics cooks it all into an unmistakable fear-sweat that’s hard to wash off your skin and out of your clothes.

  Traffic should be clear this time of day, but isn’t. Patrols of faded green uniforms walk the road’s shoulders; more soldiers than last month; more military trucks and jeeps, a lot more. I make the mental notes for Carel.

  Bébé Doc’s not stupid, nor deaf. He’s tortured Haiti for fifteen years to remain the president. Bébé Doc’s heard the screams on his street corners, and he’s heard the faraway rumbles in Washington, DC, and maybe most threatening, in Miami, where his successor, Luckner Cambronne, “the Vampire of the Caribbean,” is waiting in exile. Bébé Doc’s grip on his generals is unknowable, but his cunning is a matter of record.

  My Fairlane passes the never-completed racetrack. I didn’t have to ask the driver to take the long way that avoids Cité Simone-Cité Soleil. When the Rebelyon starts—whether Castro is at its heart like President Reagan says or not—Cité Soleil will likely be ground zero, then spread too fast to contain to everywhere there’s poverty, and in Haiti, that’s everywhere.

  We dodge potholes on an all-weather road south out of the malaria valley, then begin to climb toward the mountains. My meeting is with Myers’s Rum’s new distributor. His predecessor was a Frenchman who had trouble paying his taxes, then had trouble staying alive. The meeting is up-mountain in Pétion-Ville, a suburb with breezes, bougainvillea, and a natural barrier to the squalor and desperation below.

  My taxi serpentines higher into the flamboyant red trees. The soldiers and personnel carriers begin to thin, as does the stench of the sun-scorched, rusted-tin ghettos and open sewers.

  At 1,200 feet, we approach tall cut-stone walls topped with jagged glass, then the massive iron gate of l’Habitation Leclerc, an estate once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte’s sister. In the 1970s it was converted to a decadent resort and casino. I never got past the gate when it was still running, but in there was the Hippopotamus Disco, moved down brick by brick from New York City, along with Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, and the crème d’Studio 54.

  Now the whole estate is empty. There wasn’t enough dope and Barbancourt Rhum for the pretty people to fade Bébé Doc’s escalating horror show—

  Screech. I bounce face-first into the front-seat headrest.

  Four of Bébé Doc’s Volontaires block the road, pistols in hand. To their left is a mutilated, naked black man propped up at the l’Habitation Leclerc gate, an emaciated dead dog in his lap. The sign strung to the man’s neck reads “Mangeur de chiens.”

  The taxi driver freezes his eyes forward but whispers a translation, “Eater of dogs. A traitor. Loyal to the Americans, the coup they plan.”

  Two of the Volontaires approach the driver’s side of our taxi. My driver goes motionless, both hands on his steering wheel. A pistol barrel raps my door.

  Bending into my open window, a black face with cheap mirrored sunglasses peers in, then says: “Documents.”

  I have no choice, and hand my passport through. He speaks Kreyol at my driver. The driver reaches to open his door. A pistol barrel slams though the open window, breaks the driver’s nose, and splashes his windshield red. The gun wags in my face. “Not him. You. Get out.”

  My heart rate ramps back to 150. I open my door, push my feet out onto the rough concrete, then stand with both hands up.

  “Your money.” The gunman extends the hand that already has my passport and visa.

  “I’m here to see General Peguero.” I point uphill toward the Hotel Oloffson. “We have business.”

  General Peguero is our new distributor, a friend of the Myers family, some say on our payroll already.

  “Peguero is a traitor. You are CIA, here to kill President Bébé Doc.” The gunman throws my passport into the road. “Tonight you can sleep with General Peguero’s head.”

  Motion behind me. I spin. Everything goes black.

  ***

  SLAP. “You were part of Operation Urgent Fury, yes? President Reagan’s invasion of Grenada. You impersonated a student there at the medical school.”

  “No. No.” Blood spray and saliva punctuate my words. “I was in college.” Pant, cough, dungeon air. “I told you, at Oxford in London; just a couple of years ago.” My eyes can’t focus. “You can check.”

  Four hands clamp me in the chair. In my face is the same round-eyed, round-faced black man who’s been interrogating me since midnight. His name is Kolonèl Idamante. I don’t know if he’s Haitian Army or Volontaires, or somehow both. Sweat drips onto his wire-rim glasses; he removes them, cleans each lens with a handkerchief.

  “We have checked, Monsieur Owens; we are aware of who visits the République. Again, your age is twenty-two, but you appear older. You are an American, but you are here.”

  I blink to focus and can’t. Kolonèl Idamante replaces his glasses, then stands with his zipper near my shredded lips. His long black fingers knead a leather sap. He swings; the blow knocks me out of the chair. Lights blink out and on. Pain radiates in my jaw, ear, and neck. The floor tastes like vomit. A boot stomps on my back; my chest flattens on the concrete. Another boot mashes my neck and cheek flat. Blood bubbles from my mouth. Blurry boot toes and laces are all I see.

  “So very strange, Monsieur Owens. One day you are a ‘game theory’ and ‘literature’ student at Oxford University in England, the next day you are in the République d’Haiti . . . selling rum for Jamaicans.” Fingers stroke the top of my head. “Why would an American leave America for university? America has many universities.”

  The boot on my neck presses harder.

  “Scholarship”—cough, spit—“four years ago; when I was a freshman. I
’m working for Myers’s now, in Kingston.” Pant; spit blood and concrete dirt. “Moved from Chicago to London; for school. Got job . . . been in Kingston two years.”

  “No. No. No, Monsieur Owens.”

  “Myers’s salesman; come to Haiti all the time, for Myers’s. No America, not since high school.”

  Kolonèl Idamante squats so our eyes can make contact. He flips my passport again, smudging at the stamps with his long thumb and polished nail. “Yes, I see that you have been to the République nine times this year and last. You are with the CIA, yes? The ‘Game Theory Department’? Here to assist in President Reagan’s coup d’état?”

  “No. Not.”

  “But you know of the coup d’état. The vampire Cambronne returns.”

  “Don’t know anyone. Not like that. I work for Myers’s, that’s all. Honest.”

  “Lies do not help. You have been many times to Odricks Corner, Virginia?” A boot slams my wrist and Kolonèl Idamante attaches pliers to my thumb. “In Miami, you work for the vampire Cambronne. You wish to make Reagan’s puppet our new president. Anything to stop a Rebelyon that aligns Haiti with Cuba. Admit this and prison for you will be easier.”

  “Never been to Miami. Don’t know Cambronne.”

  The pliers crush my thumb. I scream, writhe on the floor, rip my hand away, and lose the nail. “Goddamn, man!” I scrunch away holding my hand.

  Two Volontaires point pistols at me.

  “Monsieur Owens. Oxford informs us that you do not finish university; you become embroiled with a bad element and are forced to leave England quickly. This is a lie as well, yes? The CIA recruited you, brought you to the West Indies to stop the communists and help sell CIA cocaine. This is the truth.”

  I squeeze at the pain in my hand. “No. Wrong.” Flies buzz the blood on my face and hand. “I was a bookie’s apprentice”—pant, cough—“for horses; part-time on weekends; legal there. Ronnie Kray—twins, the Krays, gangsters—Ronnie Kray wanted me to dope horses; I wouldn’t. A friend, fellow student helped me get out; got me the job at Myers’s.”