The rebel touches his ear, confused. Commander Siri repeats her question in Kreyol. He answers “Wi,” making a fist at his neck like a hangman’s knot.
“Sistah may hang her bishop, but not the nuns. Tie Sistah’s mask tight.” Siri swears at herself, then repeats her orders in Kreyol.
The rebel hurries out.
Siri wags her phone at Anne. “Four hours ago, Lana drowned San Juan. Just now, she makes landfall at Punta Cana, DR; Category 3, winds above one fifteen. Waves at twenty feet. The storm will slow over land, slower still over the mountains. Lana will be here full-force in ten hours or less.”
Anne says. “Winds that high’ll drown your army too. Your messiah, Kolonèl Idamante, won’t be—”
Siri waves Anne off and focuses on me. “Explain the poem or Idamante’s PLF hangs Anne Bonny next.”
I say, “Where’s Susie?”
Siri tells the rebel behind me. “Hang him instead.”
“Wait a goddamn minute. I can’t get us to the gold without a boat and a pirate captain. And Susie.”
“There are other boats and captains.”
Anne says, “That’s enough, Bill.” She nods to Siri. “Bring us a good map of this coast and we’ll explain some. Although you’ll not be glad of it.”
Siri reaches behind her for a military satchel and drops it on the table. In it, she finds a map of Hispaniola’s north coast, spreads it on the table, then anchors the map with four candles. Her glance at Anne is no longer anger and banter. “Where is the gold?”
Anne nods to me. I read Siri the first verse, the stanza copied from the Poe poem—
Go over the Mountains of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow—
—then offer a blind guess about what it means to this treasure hunt because Anne and I don’t know.
“‘Mountains of the Moon’ are Haiti’s easternmost mountains—moonrise is always east.
“‘Valley of the Shadow’ is Psalm 23—the valley of the shadow of death. That’s what we decided at Oxford. O’Hare’s using Poe to foreshadow the second verse, the heart of the clue.”
“Aye,” says Anne and continues with what we do know. “The second verse reads as the 1937 Parsley Massacre—where the ‘shadow of death’ occurred. You’ll see her plain. O’Hare’s telescoping us to our treasure. Show her, Bill.”
I use Siri’s coastal map of Hispaniola to draw the rest of the island with my fingertip, then slice the image in half.
Anne says, “The Dominican Republic half is the windward side of the island. On that side, Dominicans see themselves as European. On our side, Haitians see themselves as African. The Rio Dajabón separates the races. In 1937 the Dominicans wanted to ‘cleanse’ their sainted country of Haitian braceros come to work the cane. President Trujillo sent army murder squads to the Rio Dajabón. The Dominicans showed every black worker a parsley sprig. Any black who answered pèsi in Kreyol instead of perejil in Spanish was slaughtered. Killed twenty thousand Haitians in five days.”
Siri cranes to see if any of that is in the second verse.
She reads the first two lines out loud:
But in the wind eat the herb.
Only they avoid the slaughter
Anne continues. “O’Hare’s ‘in the wind’ translates to ‘windward.’ Haiti’s eastern border is the river where ‘they avoid the slaughter.’”
Siri touches Rio Dajabón on the map. “My aunt and two uncles were among the murdered.” She looks up at Anne and me: “And the westernmost boundary would be?”
From the Rio Dajabón I push my finger west through five miles of swamp and jungle into a hidden inland bay in the mangroves. The bay is labeled Fort Liberté Bay and Freedom Bay.
I read Siri the final two lines of the verse:
Beyond the cape, fish the shallows
For they swim in freedom’s tomorrows.
I tap the bay’s western edge. “‘Cape’ is the city of Cap-Haïtien. If you go ‘beyond’ the city to the ‘shallows’ to swim in freedom’s tomorrows, you’re in Fort Liberté Bay.” I grin at my fabulousness. “After that—”
“After that,” Anne interrupts, “Ms. Florent Dusson-Siri will be makin’ our deal or she’ll be goin’ to the groves alone.”
Siri turns the poem to her. One fingertip traces the last line of the verse. Out loud, she says: “‘Swim in freedom’ in the bay at Fort Liberté. But where in the bay?”
Anne chins at the other rebels in the room. “And that’s why you need a pirate captain, dearie. Not a rebel you have standin’ will go into the groves beyond that bay.”
Siri hardens, focuses on the poem. “And this last verse? It says the groves?”
Anne shrugs. “What deal do you make?”
“Your life. And his. And Susie’s.”
Anne shakes her head. “I’ll not face the devil in the next life and this one. Look at your men; battle-tested, livin’ in the jungle—not a one will get on that boat.”
Siri keeps her eyes level and hard. “Then you’ll hang with the bishop.”
“I’ll not go near where this adventure’s leadin’ for less than the lion’s share. And only now because I need the money. Facing the devil on his home ground will likely kill us all in ways only Satan himself knows. And you know that’s not a lie.”
Siri turns to me. The pretty half of Commander Siri’s face isn’t pretty anymore. “And you? Your price to work with the ‘niggers’?”
“My understanding is we split four ways—you, me, Susie, and Anne.”
Anne and Siri forget I’m in the room and begin to argue in earnest. They threaten each other with the past, present, and future. Our three guards remain with us, uneasy on their feet, eyes searching the shadows. Siri calls for a noose.
It arrives and she throws it on the table.
Anne calls her a “mindless fuckin’ harlot” and tells Siri they’ll both be dead by the end of today.
Finally, a deal is made: Anne and I get our freedom and forty percent; Siri and the Rebelyon get sixty. Siri will provision Anne’s boat with the arms and tools I need to chase Eddie O’Hare’s clue. Siri tells a guard to untie Anne. Siri keeps her .45 cocked. The look on her face is not comforting.
I do another tennis-match between them. “What about Susie?”
Anne shakes her head small, either that Susie’s no longer important (no way) or it’s a subject we shouldn’t press given the recent exchanges with our captor.
I nod at Siri and her beret. “We’re gonna bet on your Che Guevara? Your last revolutionary—Sistah-the-beloved—proved a little iffy.”
Anne cuts to Siri and adds soothing apology to her tone. “Siri’s one of the very few on the planet whose word I’d trust. Read her the last verse.”
“Sorry, not good enough. You guys have a habit of leaving each other by the side of the road.”
Anne lowers her chin, but keeps the soothing tone. “Read us the verse, Bill. We’ve a plane to catch.”
“Not till you two tell me—”
Anne shouts me down, eyes blazing. “Read the bloody verse, Bill, then explain the goddamn thing.”
I ease back, cuffed to a chair in a fucking she-wolf three-way where your dick stopped mattering right after you picked up the dinner check.
Anne taps the narrow entrance from the ocean into the five miles of Fort Liberté Bay, says, “Three hundred years ago, like now, this channel was too shallow for the deep-hulled ships from England and Spain to navigate. Pirates like my gran used the channel to escape into a treacherous five-mile bay, now called Fort Liberté.” Anne runs her finger into the bay, veers to the right to a small island. “The only island in the bay was said to have a freshwater well. The ‘Isle of Souls,’ Ile Bayau.”
I glance at both she-wolves, then the verse.
I do a big inhale, and read out loud
as instructed:
Drink your fill The pirates will—
“Not about rhum like you’d think,” I say. “It’s about fresh water in the middle of a saltwater sea. Like Anne said.”
Siri frowns. “But the island now . . .”
Anne explains for me. “The myths say the island’s a boutique osseuse. Nothing to do with us. It’s the well we want.”
Anne and Siri’s expressions don’t look like boutique osseuse is nothing.
Anne is all about pirate history and continues: “The well was likely dug sometime in the 1600s, forty or fifty years before Fort Labouque and the Batterie de l’Anse were built at the mouth of the channel to keep the pirates from using it.”
Siri says, “Wrong. Labouque is not pirates. Labouque is a religious prison.”
Anne says, “Splittin’ hairs, dearie.”
Siri barks, “‘Hairs’ may be the difference between goin’ to the groves, and facing what waits there, or going where the gold actually is.” Siri turns to me. “Labouque was a criminal sanatorium, Ayiti’s monument to black-on-black slavery. No connection to pirates—Anne Bonny’s ancestors or any others.”
Anne says, “You’re lost in the Rebelyon glory, Florent. We’ve no time for the myth buildin’.”
“And I’ve no time for another Anne Bonny ‘adventure’ that has me rescuing us, again. Fort Labouque was converted to a prison by Emperor Faustin the First, a black puppet ruler whose sole contribution to Haiti was devising the faux French Haitian nobility. If those facts fit these clues, then—”
“If you’d stop preachin’ Rebelyon, you’d see it.”
Siri refocuses on me. “Why the island and the well? This is the gold?”
“Not the best spot for it, but could be it.” I tap the next line—
—read it out loud:
Trust only the vintner—
“We’re thinking ‘the vintner’ is the guy who dug the well. I think there’s another clue inside the well, not the gold. Maybe a brick with a mark on it . . .”
Siri says, “There were marks, images in the clues we took from the Esmeralda.”
She motions at the files. I point her to O’Hare’s drawing found in Jamaica.
Siri inspects the “tortoise” drawing of Tortuga.
I say, “There was an image like it at Bois Caïman, too, cut into a stone that pointed to de Mezy. And one in the Cap-Haïtien square that’s supposed to be—”
“Mackandal’s mark.” Siri traces the cross. “His death stone from Port-au-Prince. Mackandal spoke fluent French and Arabic, but made a mark instead of a signature. The slaves used his mark to mark trails and trees, the houses of the planters to be killed.” She points at the latest Barbancourt bottle. “In the de Mezy wine cellar, the mambo pointed us to the brick with Mackandal’s mark.”
“When was he born?”
Siri says, “Early 1700s.”
I look at Anne, ask: “The well was dug in the 1600s?”
She nods. I say, “Fits perfect. If Mackandal’s mark is in the well, it would’ve been put there long after the well was complete. By Eddie O’Hare and his crew . . . before Eddie killed them all.”
Siri nods again, leans back, says, “The first verse—the Poe stanza—you don’t know what it means, do you?”
I glance Anne. She says, “The well’s where we’re supposed to go.”
“Two verses out of three’s a start.” I nod at the window patch. “And we need to . . . start.”
Siri listens to the wind. “Anne made it clear that not understanding all of it will kill us.”
“Yeah. And so will everything else in your fucking country.”
The Red Market
Haiti
Chapter 22
Susie Devereux
The last time he had me here I tried to kill myself. Tried hard, real hard. His iron gibbet is cold on my naked skin. His drugs cloud my eyes, but not enough to kill my memories. The room’s smell is sweet, sharp, and pungent; one of his signatures, unmistakable, burned into my nightmares. Two days ago, my pistol jammed in Chicago. If not, I’d be in the ether, possibly a different hell, anticipating a less horrifying outcome.
The gibbet fixes my field of vision rigid, straight ahead at a four-by-four glass pane, into an air-conditioned, antiseptic room. The glass separates where I am from where I will go next. That room has a tilt operating table, bright lights, and instrument trays. His room is part of a modern germ-free facility amid the jungle rot—an operating theater in his red-market “hospital.”
I have escaped him once and outfought his kidnappers three times. My best hope now is to be “harvested” for my organs. Harvesting means my death will be quick—an overdose of Heparin, then kidneys, heart, lungs, liver, intestines, tendons, ligaments, and skin. My parts have far more value when the organs aren’t damaged. Torture destroys the value. If he decides that money matters more than pride. If this horror palace hasn’t driven him completely insane.
Noise. A door behind my cage. A rush of humid air.
They’re coming. He’s coming.
Two men in lab coats move past my metal cage and into the operating room. Both secure masks over their nose and mouth, then rubber aprons, then gloves. One begins to arrange surgical instruments on the trays. Neither look through the window at me.
A pungent odor sours my side of the glass. My skin hives. A cane clicks on the floor. I squint for a reflection in the glass; can’t see what I know is behind me—
Breath on my neck. Warm, measured. The inhale is nasal, sniffing my skin. I jam forward into the gibbet’s bars. The warm breath creeps down my spine; stops at my waist. Two fingertips touch; I jolt—
The door again: humid air; voices. A naked black man is rolled past my gibbet and into the operating room. He pleads in Kreyol. Only his head can move. His eyes are wide and white. The door closes. One of the lab coats wipes the man’s chest and abdomen with an antiseptic, shaves a four-inch strip from chest to pelvis, then injects the man’s arm. The other lab coat lifts the autopsy saw.
The black man’s mouth gapes in a final scream. They begin to harvest him before he’s dead. My eyes crush shut.
“There, there . . .” The voice behind me is French-accented and calm: “Our donor suffers only a moment.” Silence, breathing. “We will do nine today . . . Then, Susan, I will do you. Slowly. Just you and me.”
The voice trails off as it walks past on my left and into the operating room. His shirt and pants are European; his head small, the neck narrow and long and too thin to fill his collar. His movements are measured, calm; regal because God has no authority here.
With his back to me, the Gryphon dips a small finger in the harvest’s blood, turns, rubs a red cross on the window, then places his nose almost on the glass. His breath clouds the small cross. The fingertips of his left hand lean his cane against the window, then gently knead at my breast through the glass. Behind the hand, his eyes are hooded, sunken; his butterscotch skin scarred from cysts and boils, old and new—the source of the soured-perfumed odor that still lingers on my skin. The face frames a distended mouth and a practiced, gray-lipped smile.
Demons are real.
I am naked in a cage.
In my nightmares, he eats parts of me while I am still alive.
Chapter 23
Bill Owens
Muffled gunfire rips outside the sacristy’s window patch. I’m still inside, still leg-cuffed to the chair. Anne’s broken fingernail is on Cap-Haïtien to show where we are. She traces the route we’re about to take—pushing her fingernail east along the north coast of Haiti for twenty miles, fifteen of which will be open ocean—then stops at the narrow channel that cuts inland like a tunnel, into the five-mile Fort Liberté Bay.
“Beginning here, at the channel’s entry, then halfway around the bay’s east rim are a series of purpose-built fortificati
ons. The French garrisoned them to defend their colony’s interior. Five forts total, not four.”
Anne shoves her hand at Siri to stop whatever Siri intends to say, then continues.
“The fifth fort, the original Dimanche, is inland, not on the bay, buried in a hundred square miles of mangrove wren.” Anne taps an unmarked spot deep in the mangroves south of the bay. “This Dimanche is a fortified sixteenth-century French Corsican monastery that sank in the earthquake of 1762.”
“Wait a minute.” I point her at the island in the center of the bay. “We’re going to the island, right?”
Anne doesn’t move her finger from the monastery spot. “Susie’s alive. And that monastery is where she is. The Gryphon has her.”
Commander Siri tosses a thin glassine packet on the table. “Piccard’s people delivered it yesterday. He and the Gryphon want the gold; all of it. If not, Susie dies in the gibbets, then the rest of us, all our families, all our friends, wherever they hide.”
The packet has a two-inch square, a rose tattoo on thick parchment.
Anne plants her right foot onto the table, then points at the rose tattoo on her ankle. “That was on Susie’s ankle. From the Rugby World Cup in ’94.”
Wind slaps at the patched window.
Anne and Siri cut to the sound of Hurricane Lana closing in. Siri tells the guard behind me to uncuff my leg.
Anne continues, “Part of the myth—why Siri’s rebels will face UN cannon and hurricanes but not the Gryphon—is the devil lifted the monastery out of the sea in 1986 and gave it to the Gryphon in return for his services. Haiti has a history of earthquakes. Big ones that do odd things. If the original Dimanche has risen, then it makes sense that it could be the Gryphon’s stronghold.”
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