Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  Thunder rumbles over the boat. Anne’s eyes snap open.

  Our radio updates the hurricane: Lana has slowed down. Anne chins dead ahead into a surreal, backlit horizon of gray and black. “I’d say we have forty-eight hours before we need to be elsewhere.”

  “Is forty-eight hours enough?”

  “Maybe. Storm’s good cover, though. Cat 3 or better hittin’ a ragamuffin island like Haiti, and at high tide?” Anne shakes her head. “Won’t be us the authorities are worried about.”

  “Which authorities would that be?”

  Anne locks eyes with me. She blows out a breath, grabs her radio mic, and call-signs for Captain BeBe. He answers. Anne tells him to change course, recradles the mic, and yells down for Taller to take the Star’s wheel. Taller climbs to the fly bridge and takes over. Anne points me off the bridge to the main cabin.

  Down below, Sistah sits cross-legged in her blood circle, eyes closed, unaffected by the hull’s constant crashes and the smell of death. Someone has added a heavy Spanish crucifix to her lap. Anne counts the tablets in Sistah’s medicine bottle, then grabs the chart of Haiti’s north coast and a bottle of rum. She slides into a bench seat behind a fixed table and waves me to join her.

  Sistah doesn’t look up as I pass. If she still has her knife, it’s not out. I take the bench seat facing her. Anne rubs tired eyes, spreads the chart on the mess table, holds it down with her elbows, then drinks from the rum bottle. “Would ya like the good news first, or the bad?”

  “If we can survive the bad news, let’s go with the good.”

  “Survivin’ll be difficult, Bill.” Pause. “We’re goin’ to Haiti. I’m sorry, but that’s the whole of it.”

  “Gosh. I’m shocked.”

  “So we best discuss who’s waiting for us. I need to know you understand the ramifications, all of ’em.”

  “Now I am shocked.”

  “Your clear thinkin’ under fire will be . . .” Anne licks her lips. “Cranston Piccard is a lot of people’s nightmare, but he’d be Christmas compared to the Gryphon.” She swigs from the bottle. “Some of Haiti’s ministers and police say the Gryphon’s a myth, like they say the red market is a myth, but they know different—”

  “Susie mentioned the red market. That shit’s true? Why the rebels called Cambronne ‘the vampire’?”

  Anne nods. “Back in the 1970s, before AIDS was identified, Haiti’s blood was in demand for its concentration of antibodies. US hospital corporations paid a premium and imported all that was available. The Gryphon was the Luckner Cambronne lieutenant who saw the market, built Cambronne his blood farm to increase the supply.”

  “Blood farm?”

  “Hospitals—one in Cap-Haïtien, one in Port-au-Prince. A ferry truck would come through Cité Soleil and Cap-Haïtien every day. The poor and desperate would be collected to sell their blood. When the US demand would spike the price above the supply, the Gryphon would kill the donor, say he died by accident, take all his blood and sell the body separate. Estimates guess he and Cambronne drained thirty thousand . . . to death.”

  “Jesus.” The visual gags me. “And you think we’re gonna trap this monster?”

  Anne wince-nods, then places her fingernail on the chart at Haiti’s far northeast border. “Ever been into Fort Liberté Bay? The Mangrove Coast? Monde perdu?”

  I shrink into the bench.

  Back in the ’80s, the Mangrove Coast was called monde perdu, “the lost world”—an impenetrable warren of brackish mangrove swamp fed by one river and cut off by steep mountain cliffs; nothing there but malaria and crocodiles. And monster myths. When the Haitians in the cities said “Gone to the groves,” they meant the devil had taken a person, and bullshit myth or not, the person never came back.

  Anne takes another drink from the bottle, weighs our sliver of gold ingot. “For a dollar less than $26 million, I’d turn us to Cartagena and take our chances that Lana doesn’t catch us open-ocean.”

  “Nobody’s that scary.”

  “A big reader, ya were at Oxford, Bill. Heart of Darkness, Frankenstein?” Anne’s green eyes narrow. “At best—and we’re a far distance from best—the Gryphon’s a pirate, a Corazón Santo warlord, like the Somali warlords in east Africa who pushed the US army back to Bill Clinton’s desk—except much, much stronger. The Haitians believe the Gryphon has God and the devil in his pockets. If I had to guess, he’s landing almost half as much cocaine as Carlos Lehder did when Carlos was the man. The Gryphon’s sending his to Mexico, not the US direct. People who’d know guess five tons every month. That buys a lot of power on a third-world island.” Anne’s fingers close around the ingot until her knuckles whiten. “And at worst, the Gryphon’s proof demons can take a man, infect him . . . just like the Bible thumpers say. We’ll not survive a meetin’ with him on his home ground, nor anywhere else without a trap in place.”

  Demons and Haiti is not a concept that requires a salesman. And no one wants to hear their pirate captain quote the Bible out of fear. Anne was once a dramatic Irish lass, and I mention that possibility.

  She finds a half-smile but her eyes harden. “Remember our balcony that night in ’86 when the Tontons Macoutes were dancin’ in the fires? Celebrating Cambronne’s return to lead the fight? The Gryphon has him a thousand of those night howlers, bartered for out of the prisons, recruited from the street gangs and garbage heaps.” The half-smile quits. “Men and boys like the ones who had you in Fort Dimanche. Has ’em up in those mangrove swamps, armed to the teeth, white-out crazy on bloodroot and cocaine, capable of behavior no Somali warlord would sanction.”

  I glance at Anne’s white knuckles, then Sistah on the floor in her blood circle. White and blood seem to be a theme here. Sistah looks up, chin elevated, the rope scar wide and shiny. She wants her country and its latest Rebelyon to kill me.

  The waves shake Anne and me sideways. She puts two fingernails on the chart. “We’re goin’ here; the Gryphon’s somewhere here.” Her fingernails are a grand total of one inch apart. “The UN has six thousand troops in Haiti but they don’t go into Fort Liberté Bay or the other two reef cuts that lead up into the Gryphon’s bayou river. Five years ago, your DEA crossed the DR border at the Rio Masacre with fifty DR special operators. Sixty men total boarded boats at Fort Liberté. Not one boat or one man came back.” Anne eyes Sistah. “And the fifty thousand Ida rebels who are about to put Haiti to flame, as fierce committed as they are, don’t go near the Gryphon either.”

  Sistah blinks just once.

  I fake the best smile I can. “Look on the bright side, Eddie O’Hare’s treasure doesn’t have a volcano.”

  Anne cocks her head backward toward the bow and the cloud wall dead ahead. “A volcano, this boat might could outrun. I’ve just done the numbers, Bill. Outrunning our hurricane will take more gas than the Sazerac can carry.”

  “Do not fucking say that.”

  “At some point, Lana will add speed . . . and she’s comin’ dead at us.”

  I palm my face. “If I was a believer, I’d say we’re cursed.”

  “Aye.” Anne reaches to touch Sistah in her blood circle. “The whole of the country’s cursed, if ya ne remember.”

  Glare. “I remember. No god-fearing tent shouter can have black heathens outfight a white professional army without help from hell.”

  Anne smooths at Sistah’s dreads, both finding comfort in the touch. “Aye. As impossible as it was, Haiti’s slaves outfought the French and the Spanish armies. Took thirteen years. Created the first black people’s republic in the history of the world.” Anne’s eyes pay Sistah respect, then cut to me. “And the slaves’ patron, Bill? Who all sides say the devil birthed that night in Bois Caïman to lead the slaves first revolt?”

  Anne reaches across the table and turns over my gun hand, holding it open. Her thumb presses the Ezili carved across the lifeline in my palm. “The Black Madonna,
Ezili Dantor.” Anne’s fingers roll my palm up tight in hers. “You and I killed her bloodline’s daughter. Year of our Lord, 1986.”

  ***

  Pétion-ville, Haiti

  1986

  My high-ceilinged room at the Hotel Oloffson has six blurry people in it—Carel Roos, three Selous Scouts, Anne Bonny, and what’s left of me. Anne has just returned from her “BBC” interview with “the vampire” Luckner Cambronne. She says the interview went as expected but doesn’t elaborate, walks to the bathroom, and shuts the door behind her.

  Thirty minutes later she opens the bathroom door in a robe, toweling her hair. Anne looks across my bed to Carel cleaning an Uzi next to a Ka-Bar fighting knife. She says, “Not even a small chance you’ll take Cambronne. Either you kill him for half your contract or die tryin’ to get him out alive for the full amount.”

  Carel answers with a smile. His accent is fluid Afrikaner and matches the three Scouts in the chairs behind him checking their weapons. “Mind ya, now, Anne of the islands.” Carel’s smile broadens. “This is your professional opinion?”

  Anne hardens her tone. “Mentallers, Carel, Tontons Macoutes. Every one of ’em armed with CIA-delivered AKs, tarted up in chicken blood, and screamin’ high on cocaine.” Anne points out my tall, open verandah doors. “And even if we trap Cambronne in this room and escape his Tontons, you yourself said the peninsula highway was already a bunny-fuck when you came in.”

  “We’ve passed worse. Afrika—”

  “No, Carel, Haiti may look like Afrika, but she’s different here, the regular army’s strong. They’ll take control of the ports. But the roads and cities—where we have to be—they’ll leave to the rebels and Cambronne’s Tontons to fight over. Castro’s Communists have supplied the rebels well, probably just as good as the CIA has supplied Cambronne’s Tontons.” Anne nods to me. “Bill’s local people done their jobs and we best listen—they say there’s no gettin’ out east to the DR either. By the time we’re on the mountain road to the east, Cambronne’s Tontons will’ve barricaded it against the rebels. I see it as it is; we should’ve stayed in England—but since we didn’t, you and your mates settle for half: kill Cambronne, take his head, then trek south for Jacmel on the coast. It’s the only direction we’ll survive. We make the coast, grab a boat when this three-way war is full-on, then run open-ocean for Jamaica.”

  Carel smiles at me and mimics Anne’s Irish accent. “She’s a pirate, that one.”

  Anne moves in to Carel’s face. “Cambronne wants me to be with him and his girlfriend. She’s a child, ten or twelve; she’ll come here before him, she and I’ll cozy up, call him, say we can’t wait. Cambronne will take a break from the war he’s startin’, come up the back stairs to this bed”—Anne’s hands tie an air bow on her plan—“and it’s over.”

  Carel’s still smiling. “Sounds like you miss the kaffer. Maybe you’d want some time with him and his little stekkie first?”

  The Scouts laugh. Anne darkens. “Pleased to let the big man fuck me again. So you and your mates can watch.”

  The room goes silent, a vote on how seriously Carel’s world-class killers take Anne Bonny, her temper, and her willingness to act on it.

  Carel turns to me. “Haiti’s your part of the world. Anne’s as well, arsehole that it is. Is our esteemed pirate lady spot-on?”

  I nod my weak neck and swollen head an inch. “Cambronne’s Tontons Macoutes are psycho; carve that in stone. Can’t say how well armed or how many, but the CIA has plenty of money.” Blink. I refocus, dizzy. “But even if Cambronne has ten thousand down there, they’ll be outnumbered fifty to one by Haiti’s citizens . . . once the killing starts for real in Port-au-Prince. Yesterday’s terrified citizens are today’s rebels, and they hate the Tontons and the army.”

  “Well armed, they are? The citizen rebels?”

  My hand steadies me against the louvered door. “If Castro supplied the rebels with even half what the CIA gave Cambronne’s Tontons, it’ll be a bloodbath. Everybody above ground will be somebody’s target.”

  One of Carel’s Scouts nods to my foggy assessment and says, “Lebanon.”

  “If you say so. But for sure, Anne’s right about any escape plan. The path south I showed you on the map will get worse the closer we get to the lake, but the path does skirt the worst of the mountains. And you guys are jungle guys. From the south side of the lake you might could veer east through to the DR.”

  Anne waves her hand. “Nobody’s goin’ uphill or on a ‘path’ to the DR. Bill ain’t thinkin’ straight.”

  Carel turns back to me. “What about our boat to Jamaica? The seventy kph contrabander you said we could hire on the south coast? Your kaffer’s there waiting?”

  “Whoa.” I push both hands between me and Carel’s Ka-Bar knife, stumble, and use Anne for balance. “You told me to find out but not make a plan. Once the shooting and machetes start, it’ll be civil war every mile in every direction.”

  Anne says, “Sailin’ from the south coast can work, if we can get there. We grab this hotel’s assistant manager—Bill says his family ‘fishes’ there out of Jacmel; the cocaine trade. We avoid the mudslides and floods that Bill’s already mentioned on mountain road, get down to the family’s dock, and sail west.

  “After we clear Haiti’s peninsula, it’s two hundred miles of open water to Port Royal.” Anne winks. “Run out of gas, tiny bit of motor trouble, and we’re adrift, waitin’ for whatever God sends us.”

  Carel turns to the Scouts. “Take this kaffer’s head? On delivery, we’ll only get half pay, less our upfront money. But the cocaine here is mealie-cheap; we could pool what money we have on us, plus what we take from the kaffer, buy cocaine here or ganja in Jamaica; we could come out near the same when our boat docks in Afrika.”

  They look at each other and nod. Carel turns to Anne, “Call your little girl.”

  “Don’t have to, she’s downstairs in the bar. With five of Cambronne’s Tontons.”

  Carel tells his Scouts to take their positions. “Once Cambronne’s in this room, we go hot.” Carel hands me a 9 mm pistol that I don’t know how to use and shows me the safety. “Cambronne’s bodyguards expect you to be here somewhere. Go down to the bar where they can see you. Stay there till you hear gunfire up here, then get back to us fast. Shoot whoever’s in the way. But not until you hear gunfire up here. Can you do that?” Carel looks into my one hooded eye. “Do you understand me, Bill?”

  “Up the stairs. Shoot whoever I have to.”

  Carel says it again, “Do not stay in the bar. There’s a bomb there. Run up the stairs after the shooting starts.”

  “Shoot whoever I have to.” The gun feels like a lump of metal in my hand.

  “After we start up here.” Carel turns to his Scouts, says, “Howzit, laaities?”

  All three punch their thumbs.

  Carel points at the ceiling, says to Anne, “We’ll be the rats in the attic. Make us proud.”

  ***

  Downstairs, the lobby is full of Tontons Macoutes who watch me into the bar, then climb the stairs to prepare my “bride-to-be’s” room for her three-way tryst with their boss, Luckner Cambronne. I gentle onto a barstool and do not look at the young girl as she climbs the stairs.

  The bartender arrives. He’s new, but professional, asks what he might make for me.

  “A double, Myers’s dark. Bring me two.” I don’t look in the mirror. The barstool hurts. I stand and waddle-walk to the windows, stare into the nothing for so long that my knees begin to ache.

  Two more black men enter the bar but stay at the far end. They are Tonton rapist prison guards; one is my AIDS goodbye from Fort Dimanche—he grins and blows me a kiss as he cups his balls and laughs with his friend.

  I shuffle back to the bar, sit in spite of the pain, and don’t look in the mirror.

  My rum is there, as are several flies that
found it unprotected. I shoo the flies and drink. The 9 mm digs into my spine under my shirt. The Tontons laugh again. They chop out two lines of cocaine on the bar, telling the bartender what happened to me, why I waddle like a woman and look like a dog.

  My head pounds under the bandages. I tap my glass on the bar to remind the bartender. He disengages with the rapists, walks to me and asks what I’d like.

  “The rum I ordered. Another one. Please.”

  He doesn’t acknowledge our previous conversation and waits for me to release the glass. The rapists laugh. The one I recognize snorts his line of blow, wipes at his nose, then walks halfway to me and stops. He steps away from the bar, leering, as if to admire my ass, then tells the bartender he’ll pay for my drink.

  The bartender tries not to smile but can’t help it. He brings me my second double. I drink all the dark rum in the glass, set it down, then stand off the stool. My left hand grabs the bar for balance.

  The bartender smiles. The rapists laugh. Like they did at the prison.

  I glance at the blurry stairs that lead to my “bride-to-be” being raped by a gorilla on our wedding night.

  Again.

  The men notice and say something in Kreyol that they think is funny. They don’t waste the energy to tell me I won’t be allowed to stumble upstairs while their boss is doing to Anne what they did to me.

  I regrip the bar.

  The nearest rapist smiles and flicks his tongue.

  Flies re-form on my glass.

  My feet shuffle the curve of the bar toward the laugher. The Tontons watch me, unconcerned. One Tonton motions me to turn around, show him my ass. If I’m nice, he’ll have me again.

  I draw the 9 mm from the back of my pants, thumb down the safety, and without hurry or adrenaline, raise the pistol and shoot him in the face.

  LOUD. The backbar mirror splashes red; brain matter splatters the bartender. The second rapist backs away. I shoot him in the chest. He bounces off the wall; I fire again; he pancakes back on the wall, then slides to the floor. The 9 mm I’m holding stays level on the wall where the rapist used to be, my finger tight on the trigger.