Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  Anne nods. “Hadn’t thought of that. National police have to bivouac somewhere so it at least appears they intend to participate. Could be high ground anywhere. No way to tell till we get near.”

  Sistah leans out of Anne’s arms and closer to my face. “And if the police gon, Mackandal’s spirit kill you for comin’ jus’ like he kill all the owners of de Mezy.” Smile. “Unless Idamante take you off the road first and bwoy-fuck you. Again.”

  Anne jerks Sistah back and spins the two of them toward the bow.

  I stare at the back of their heads . . . and don’t aim my pistol.

  Anne tells the dark, “Sistah’s just mad at things. Sundown, BeBe, Taller, and Lon were her family. And good men they were.” Anne turns to face me, keeping Sistah behind her. “Can ya turn that pistol for me?”

  I notice my pistol is now aimed at Sistah. My hand agrees to lower the pistol.

  “Good. We’ve a hard, difficult decision to make.” Anne favors me with a small portion of the smile, then a plan.

  I listen, then repeat her plan in the worst tone I can muster: “You want me and that psycho to go ashore . . . together? Not you and her, me and her?”

  Anne nods.

  “I’ll grant you that a redheaded white woman with a bounty on her head might attract unwanted attention, but I’m not going anywhere with your unmedicated psycho girlfriend. She can tell me where the records are and I’ll find a way to get to them on my own. If that doesn’t work for you, get your best disguise ready and I’ll be here when you get back.”

  “Bill, you don’t speak the Kreyol. You’re not black. And you don’t know the city. Any trouble at all—and there’s bound to be some, given all the circumstances comin’ at the country—you’ll go mad hatter, start shootin’ like you did at the Oloffson, and we’ll all be lost.”

  “And her being with me is gonna change that? Jesus, she’ll start it. Rebelyon-religion meltdown is her bread and butter.”

  Sistah sits the gunwale, silent and calm, no hint of meltdown.

  Anne says, “Come up with a better plan and we’ll do her.”

  Exhale. City glance. Pitch-black bay glance—scary, scary shit in every direction. Clues glance. Anne’s right. If I’m going to solve this puzzle with the resources available, admitting what’s actually available is the next step. “Okay.” I focus on Anne’s emerald eyes, hoping they blind me like they always did. “Make me a believer.”

  ***

  Anne points Sistah to the Esmeralda’s bow to test the anchor.

  I climb off the stern into the inflatable dinghy. Anne’s at the motor, whispers, her lips on my ear, “At the square, keep Sistah away from the cathedral. She was sick with it once.”

  “What?”

  “Where they hung her. After accusing the bishop—”

  Sistah returns from the bow and drops into the dinghy. She coils the mooring rope at her feet, looks before she sits, and says, “The poem maps?”

  Anne cocks her head a slow inch, then answers, “Stayin’ on the Esmeralda.”

  I push off. Anne motors us toward the city’s seawall outside the main harbor.

  Closer in, the lights begin to define Cap-Haïtien’s industrial harbor. Bits of sound echo out onto the water—muffled music, engines, fear.

  Lightning crackles behind us to the east. Sweat beads my forehead. The air’s heavy. My mouth’s dry, my skin black with lamp tar.

  The sounds from shore loom louder, echoing across the water in disjointed screeches of mankind and machinery. Anne points left to the seawalls of the main harbor, lit by a battery of riot lights like the airfield on the river was. Armored UN trucks and blue-helmeted soldiers line the harbor’s outer seawalls.

  Farthest from us, a stacked container ship is docked in the harbor at the main pier. One hundred feet of concrete separates the ship’s bow from a splash-lit fence lined with spirals of razor wire on top and at the bottom. UN soldiers defend their side.

  Outside the fence is Cap-Haïtien’s jammed waterfront boulevard. One thousand kaleidoscope-colored Haitians shout and crush, hoping for a way onto the ship. Some wave large white flags at the UN soldiers. Some brandish machetes.

  I’ve seen CNN video of overloaded boats from Haiti capsized in the Florida Straits. If a thousand people pile on the deck of that container ship and Hurricane Lana comes through the harbor . . . What the fuck are these Haitians thinking? I look inland for conditions that must be worse than an open deck in a hurricane, then at Anne. She’s shaking her head, either for them or for all of us.

  The outer harbor’s lights and UN fortifications fade on our left. Dead ahead, the city’s outline materializes and seems to shiver in the gloom. A crumbling seawall defends this section of the waterfront’s boulevard and the three- and four-story colonial façades above it. The air smells and tastes like a barn fire where horses died.

  Anne points us at a barren outcrop fronted by riprap. Anne asks Sistah.

  Sistah says, “A park, the day lot for donkeys, for the ladies who bring their goods to the Iron Market.”

  One hundred yards out, Anne makes a slow pass on the park. The park is a triangle and slopes downward from the boulevard above. Drum fires splash orange light. Shapes in the park shrink and tower in the shadows. Panicked, frightened shapes. Angry and drunken shapes, shapes that could, and would, swamp a dinghy with a motor in seconds.

  Anne has Sistah test-call the cell phone Anne will keep. International would be hopeless, but on-island might work another day if it works now. On the third try, Anne’s phone rings. Anne reads her screen, then drops her phone back into a waterproof pouch hanging from her neck. She reaches for the outboard’s throttle, then stops and stares ashore, listening, trying to read something she can’t quite hear or see, mumbling to herself: “Aye, Gran Anne, it’s dark water we sail. The witchin’ hour’s upon us.”

  Anne keeps her hand on the throttle but adds no gas. I look for the threat but can barely see the water except for patches of oil that reflect the light. Anne finally gives in and points the dinghy southwest. Her voice sharpens. “Eight blocks from the park to the square. Pick up a bottle, but don’t look drunk. Follow Sistah.” Anne grabs my wrist, stares hard at me, and mouths, “No cathedral.”

  I nod an inch.

  Anne hesitates a last time, then swings the dinghy hard left toward the riprap on the park’s far north side and runs us in fast.

  Garbage-and-debris slicks ring the riprap. Sistah jumps first. Her fingers grab the rocks but can’t hold their edges; she fights for purchase.

  I jump and pancake against the riprap. The rocks are slimy and stink of human waste. All of me grips tight, pulling my face to the rocks. Flame shadows crackle above my head. Kreyol voices shout. Cinders fall on my shoulders, the char mixing with the bay’s stench. Four feet away, Sistah is spidered across the rocks. I grab higher. Four pulls, face in the stink, and I’m to the top.

  Blink. Focus. Reset the pistol in my belt.

  Sistah climbs up and over, crouches near me, quick-reads the park while tying a kerchief across her nose and face. Like the “new her” on the boat, “meltdown” is no longer part of her act. She coils, then sprints into the park’s loud voices, barrel fires, and shadows. I follow, head down, bumping through shapes and shadows to the park’s edge.

  Overloaded tap-tap buses cram the boulevard. Tailpipes spew diesel and unmuffled roar. Hordes of people crush in every direction and no direction. Bright clothes, black faces, a goddamn street carnival of drunks and thugs . . . and rag people with baskets and—

  A loudspeaker blares in Kreyol. It’s a PA, mounted on top of a gray UN armored personnel carrier trapped in the bus traffic.

  Sistah jumps into the boulevard between the buses, edging, shouldering, head down, hands up, and finally across into the city. She looks left, then right. Open sewer runs at the curb. Half-naked kids play in the offal. I run th
rough the traffic and push her forward out of the light.

  The street is a river of sweaty people, arms above their heads; black faces, white eyes. Hands grip Sistah’s shoulders and mine. A man grabs at Sistah’s dreads; her knife slashes and he screams. We push and shove. Fistfights erupt to our left. Glint of her knife. Men yelling. Urine. Sweat. Red paint is stenciled on the buildings:

  Idamante!

  Rebelyon!

  Sistah veers left onto a lettered street. Hundreds of sandals and shoes kick up spalled-concrete dust that will soon be rivers of mud. The dust stings my eyes and lungs. Coughing, we fight through the first block. Sistah turns right at the corner of a shuttered building and onto a numbered street. Freshly painted Idamante! drips on both sides of the building. Crowds crush toward us. We hop from doorway to doorway, then left onto another lettered street sloshed with foul water. Sistah pushes through the crowd, farther and farther until the narrow street bursts into the open.

  The square.

  Two blocks long on each side, and packed with . . . revelers?

  Bright-colored clothes roil like boiling gumbo. Music pounds from powerful speakers hidden by the huge crowd. Sistah adds posture, eyes locked on the white colonial edifice that dominates the square from two blocks away—has to be the Cathedral Notre Dame. Skunk weed and sweat is all I can smell. Black faces shout; bodies mosh tribal; faces drink from plastic bags.

  Radio crackle. Foreign voice. Military.

  I spin away. My feet tangle with an old man and woman crouched on the pavement against the wall. Six UN soldiers push between Sistah and me, rifles ready. I jump from the sidewalk into the roiling square. The revelers swallow me. I slice left, then right, push through crowd, find a spot, and look back.

  The six UN soldiers in the square are outnumbered one hundred to one.

  Sistah is coming toward me and away from the cathedral. Ten revelers bang me into a statue, a tall figure splashed in red and caped with a white sheet. Five Haiti national police burst through the revelers, club two with rifle butts, and rip the sheet off the statue. I stumble away, slide deeper into the square, and am banged into a lone iron column. It has an iron plaque at eye level: “Place d’Armes, 2001.”

  Blink. 2001? I look down. Underneath the roiling boots and sandals and bare feet is smooth concrete and cobblestones.

  All new.

  New, like rebuilt. Broke and starving, so the government tore down the buildings and rebuilt the square? I do a frantic 360. All new. Whatever buildings were here for plantation records aren’t here now. Sistah pops through the revelers and stops four feet away, seemingly unthreatened by the mayhem.

  I shout over the bedlam: “Your records building is gone. Right?”

  Sistah scans over the heads that surround us.

  “The square’s all new. We have a plan B for the history of plantations?”

  “Messiah Mackandal’s death stone is not new.” She zigzags into the mosh.

  “Wait, goddammit!” A large white flag tied to a bamboo pole unfurls between us. Stamped in red is: Idamante! and an outline of the rapist’s face. I’m twenty feet behind Sistah, skirmishing through Haitians wild-eyed on end-of-the-world coming at them from three directions.

  The music quits when I get past the flag. A man’s voice exhorts the crowd in Kreyol. I look up to a high stage. A national police commander is centered on the stage behind a pole microphone. He’s backed by twenty helmeted commandos with automatic rifles. Sistah keeps moving. I catch three of the commander’s Kreyol phrases, which translate to “white man,” “white woman,” and “money or reward.”

  The crowd pays no attention. Two more Idamante! flags unfurl, and the crowd roars approval.

  “RE-BEL-YON!”

  “RE-BEL-YON!”

  Eight commandos leap off the stage and fight toward the flags.

  Sistah stops mid-square at a lone palm tree, just south of a wall built of PA speakers. She opens her cell phone like she’s answering a call, speaks, and disconnects.

  An old woman sits against the lone palm tree on dirt inside a formal stone border. Sistah yells at the old woman in Kreyol, then French. The music starts again and the old woman shrinks. She’s gaunt and rickety. When I help her up, she’s apologizing. The old woman blinks leathery eyelids at my English and my accent, then extends a frail hand. I scoop all my coins and fill her palm. My lamp-tar disguise smears on her skin. She squints and tries to figure the stain.

  Sistah shoos the old woman, demanding she make room for the patriots.

  The old woman hobbles over the low stone border, clutching my coins to her chest.

  Under the palm tree, Sistah points at the headstone of slave-leader/sorcerer François Mackandal: “Here. The French devils burn Mackandal at the stake.”

  “Okay.”

  Sistah looks above the crowd, then squares up toward the turrets of Notre Dame.

  I bang her arm. “Plantation records.”

  Sistah turns just her head. “Your Susie Devereux is here.”

  “Where?”

  “Susie Devereux has the answer.” Sistah points her knife at me. “She is here. The records are here.”

  I step back and bounce off gyrating bodies. “Where, goddammit?”

  “There. The Christian house. Susie Devereux has always been there.”

  “Bullshit. Susie isn’t here and neither are the plantation records.” My hand cocks to defend against the knife. “Gimme your phone. We’re going to plan B.”

  “The records and Susie Devereux. I know where they are—” Sistah shows me her phone but doesn’t give it to me. “Same as you knew the winery.” She backs into the crowd; the mosh swallows her. She turns and bolts toward the cathedral’s main doors.

  A fight starts behind me. I’m shoved hard, trip, and land face-first on Mackandal’s oval-shaped gravestone. It has a cross carved into it. A hand bats my head. I jump up into a circle of dangerous faces, features aged by poverty and AIDS. I shove through before the faces can decide I’m a target.

  Sistah’s white T-shirt and dreads flash in the crowd. She’s almost to the street that fronts the cathedral. On her left, two armored UN trucks roll into the square, their lights flashing, PAs blaring Kreyol to disperse the crowd.

  I look at the night sky for Hurricane Lana, can’t tell how much time we have, then look back for Sistah and our only phone.

  Lightning cracks loud across the eastern sky to my left, then in front of me above the cathedral. The revelers jolt. Thunder hammers the square. I step back out of the UN trucks’ path. Sistah’s already at the cathedral’s doors. She’s on her cell, feet planted, facing the square.

  On my right, five women push through to the street. Serious-looking women, not revelers. I duck to a knee. One isn’t a woman, it’s the old man from Bois Caïman. He’s speaking fast, pointing at Sistah but not moving toward her. Gotta be the Gryphon’s crew.

  On my left are six national police in riot helmets and gear. They sieve through the crowd and re-form into a phalanx, rifles at port arms, all but one looking at Sistah and the cathedral’s doors. He has a finger in his ear, talking to a radio.

  Five more national police join the formation.

  I glance right to the Gryphon’s crew. One woman pulls a pistol from her pants and a second pistol from her shirt.

  The eleven police and the four women are fifty feet apart in the crowd. Sistah is between them. She closes her cell phone. One of the tall cathedral doors cracks open behind her. A bloody pig bursts through, slit down its back, squealing as it slips and slides on the cobblestones. Sistah strikes at the pig as it passes. She sees me and stops. We lock eyes; she disappears inside.

  The police stop on their side of the cathedral entry. The armed women emerge from the crowd on the opposite side. All four of the women now have pistols in both hands.

  Three. Two. One—

&n
bsp; The women stiff-arm eight pistols and fire them all. Five of the eleven policemen buck sideways or down; three run; three fire automatic rifles. Sixty rounds spray the women and the crowd. I drop. People scream and ring backward.

  Both armored UN trucks lurch into reverse. They roll backward through the square toward the gunfight at the front of the cathedral.

  Three of the women are down; the fourth and the old man run west toward the edge of the cathedral. One of the last three policemen is still alive, on a knee, rifle at his feet, dazed in the cordite haze. Revelers sprawl the plaza, dead or dying. Blood runs the cobblestones.

  I stand up as the nearest UN truck passes and run beside it. The driver veers toward the cathedral’s main doors. I angle off toward a low white wall just to the right of the main doors. The wall is topped with bars but has an open gate and I race through.

  A uniformed guard crouches inside and stays crouched as I run past him. We’re in a courtyard, a cloister. No lights. Has to be a door into the cathedral? There, on the left, a heavy door . . . would be to the cathedral’s nave. Gunfire explodes in the square. I duck.

  The nave door opens a crack.

  I rush it, slam through, bounce sideways and into cool candlelit shadows. A nun is sprawled on the floor . . . like maybe the door just knocked her down. She struggles to make her knees and aim a pistol. Footfalls echo in the side aisle. I duck into a pew, draw my pistol, and crawl toward the center aisle.

  From behind, cold metal slams into my neck. “Estope! Rete!”

  I spin, am knocked down, scramble up and into the center aisle—a boot kicks the pistol out of my hand. I make my feet. A rifle butt pounds into my chest, bounces me off a pew’s end. I land on the stone floor, a boot slams between my shoulders: “No move! No move!”

  I fight to stand; body weight lands on my back. Boots crowd my face and shoulders. Can’t move; hot breath on my neck. Through the boots, I can see more men . . . ragged green fatigues. Red armbands.

  Rebels. At least fifty.

  A pig squeals. Sistah’s at a side altar. She yells in Kreyol. More boots rush toward me.