Privateers

by Charlie Newton

  “Twenty-six million,” I murmur. “That’s what I have.”

  “What you have is a moral dilemma, to save . . . someone.”

  “No, no, I have $26 million. A man’s gotta make a lot moves, take a lot of risk, to make that much money. Money I can give you.”

  His hand produces a syringe. “So we understand from your women. They called from inside the Castle Barbancourt. Susie Devereux has proposed an exchange to save you. This means she does not have the gold. For if the gold were in her possession, she would leave you to your fate.” The syringe glints between us. “The water well on the ‘Isle of Souls’ held a bomb, but then you know that. The Castle Barbancourt was the same, and you knew that as well. Perhaps there is no gold, only bombs.”

  “I lied to Piccard; Anne and Susie have the key. Probably already found whatever Eddie O’Hare left at Castle Barbancourt. If it wasn’t $26 million in gold—and you don’t know for sure that it wasn’t—then it was a clue. I can handicap the clue, they can’t. And you can’t. Take Susie’s deal; take me to them at the castle.”

  “Your decision on the children?”

  “Wait, goddammit!”

  The brown face slams into mine. My head bangs stone and my eyes jam shut. His breath is rancid and hot on my cheeks. Lips peel on my skin. Teeth click. He’s gonna bite me, rip part of face and neck away.

  Through my teeth I say, “Twenty-six million.”

  His lips move to my ear. “When the time comes, and it will come very soon, you will save yourself.”

  A knock on the closed cell door.

  Someone speaks urgent Kreyol from the other side.

  The lips tell my ear, “A matter requires my attention.” The lips ease back. The cane clicks on the stone floor, and the hard soles move away. The door creaks. My eyes snap open; dim light paints a wedge on the floor. The door doesn’t close.

  Dust falls on my skin.

  From the mortar joints? Jesus, Lana’s wind must be—The wall shakes against my back. A flashlight comes through the door; the figure holding the light is backlit, a large disfigured woman—the black woman with educated English who was wrestled down on the dock. She snatches my chain lock like she wants to open it.

  A Tonton comes in behind her. The large woman shouts in Kreyol; the Tonton balks, shakes his head, then goes for his gun. Her hand flashes a knife that buries in the Tonton’s chest. Blood gushes. She stabs and stabs until he slides down the wall.

  Standing over him, she wipes her hands, belts the knife, strips his keys, sucks a breath, and says: “I am Tafat.” Her left hand keys the lock on my chain. “His boots, take them. Hurry-hurry.”

  She smells of soap, not rot, throws me my clothes tied in a roll by a red armband. “We join the rebels. Put the armband in your pocket until we are clear of here.”

  The room shivers floor-to-ceiling and knocks me back a step. “Damn. Gotta be a monster to do that.”

  “Soon, some or all of Dimanche will drown. The Gryphon saves what he can. We must beat him into the groves.” She points at my hand. “Messiah Mackandal brings Ezili Dantor. Ayiti will be free again.”

  Tafat checks the hall. Two black women with backpacks crouch there. Both are world-class not pretty, armed with knives and AK-47s. Tafat shoos the ten children out over two bodies who moments ago were their captors, speaking soft Kreyol and pointing.

  I dress, and Tafat waves for me to follow. Behind the two black women are two more dead Tontons. I look for another way—see none, and run with the women to the left, then right, then through a maze of passages and rooms and more passages and finally outside.

  Into a gale.

  We stop running and duck under a roofed courtyard open on three sides. Everything is drowning in rain and dark. One woman yells in my ear: “A trail—your escape was near it—difficult, but can be passed.” She stinks of sweat and bayou. Tafat grabs my arm and we run into the howl.

  And keep running.

  ***

  Every step for the last hour has been battered in rain and wind, and I’m so fucking happy I could run all night.

  Tafat stops us in the trees, short of a road that’s half water. Panting, she says, “The Gryphon’s hunters will lose no time to the rising water. This is the slave road to Valliere; we must take it.” She points at my biceps. “Put on the band.” She adjusts the knife she used to kill my guard, then unhooks a flashlight from her web belt. “We must make the mountains, then the high rivers, then to Idamante in Port-au-Prince.”

  “Idamante?” I tie the red armband. “How far to him?”

  Tafat eyes me for fight or flee. “Far.” She points north toward Cap-Haïtien. “Idamante’s PLF surrounds Le Cap, but the UN fights harder there than anticipated. The Gryphon is between us and any Idamante assistance.”

  Tafat speaks Kreyol to the two women. They raise their AKs at the road. She flashes her flashlight twice into the torrential rain.

  Up the road, two hundred feet east, a light blinks once. Then again. Then again.

  Tafat flashes once.

  My “rescuers” must know about the gold and want it for the Rebelyon. Headlights appear; a small truck splashes up. Two canoe shapes are painted on the driver’s door. A shredded red T-shirt snaps and pops on his antenna. Tafat’s comrades toss their backpacks in the truck bed and jump in.

  I point at the pair of canoes painted on the truck’s doors. “We’re taking the rivers? In those?”

  Tafat says, “You do not fully understand what is behind us, or you would be pleased to die in the river.”

  I glance back into the mangroves and lightning. Tafat and I pile in the cab. The driver is young and scared and smells it. He wipes at his cracked windshield, grinds gears, and we lurch south on the rutted road, away from the Gryphon but toward the rivers and eventually Idamante.

  I mumble, “Another day, another Dracula; got ’em on every corner.”

  Wind and rain buffet the old truck. We try to hug the mountain’s craggy face. For two hours, we crawl higher through the storm, into the mountains and away from the Gryphon. Lightning splits the dark. Canyons and fissures flash on alternating sides. Our driver’s chin stays crammed above the steering wheel.

  Three thousand feet above the Gryphon’s monastery, we exit the truck at a riverfront shed. Our truck disappears. We collect two canoes.

  The river charging past my feet is loud and frothy, already Class 3 whitewater if it’s a nickel. Tafat yells that she will steer my canoe; says she has experience in the rivers, then hurries us to a cut in the bank.

  Our truck’s brake lights and headlights blink in the trees as it snakes down the road we just drove. Tafat points me to the front bench of the canoe and yells instructions in my ear: “On your knees, not the bench; remain low. Bang the rocks with your paddle. No roll.” She wheels her finger. “Roll, we drown.”

  I look at the road the Gryphon’s hunters are surely on, then at canoes built for adventure tourists, kids insane enough to come to Haiti in the first place. I could survive this; it could happen.

  Tafat’s two comrades go first. They’re gone in a blink. Three, two, one . . . and probably already dead.

  Tafat and I climb into our canoe. The hull vibrates like it’s up against a belt sander. She shoves us from the bank cut, and the river sweeps us away.

  The current’s fast; visibility is close to zero. Every fifty feet, whitewater hammers us from six directions. I slam my paddle at rocks after we’ve crashed them. The canoe tries to roll left, then right, but somehow doesn’t. River and rain try to drown us but can’t. After an eternity of whitewater, we beach on a muddy ledge, crawl out, and collapse.

  The wind and rain feel like they’ve tripled. The two female Tontons are there, alive. They speak Kreyol to Tafat, then stand, and wave me to my feet.

  Tafat yells in my ear, “Caves. Downriver twenty miles.”

 
“More river?”

  Nod. “In the caves, we survive the hurricane. And the Gryphon.”

  We hoist the canoes over our heads and begin the portage to another river entry. The canoe is heavy but shields the wind and rain, a trade against the hammering echo that’s constant and deafening. We’ll never see or hear an attack coming. Tree branches scrape the canoe and my forearms. I focus toward my feet, invisible in the mud. Any kind of leg injury and that’ll be it.

  Lightning cracks. It snapshots a black-and-white river three feet away screaming past on our left. We drop the canoes at an entry point, then huddle under the trees. The women talk to each other’s ears, check their weapons. Tafat shouts in my ear: “No roll; roll, we drown.”

  The two women put in first; then Tafat and I. Whirlpools spin us dizzy. We careen through stark whitewater canyons flash-lit in lightning. Lana’s outer bands howl. We crash and rocket but don’t roll, don’t drown, and finally crawl out of a heart-pounding 8 mm horror show onto another muddy bank sheltered by toppled boulders, and collapse again.

  Tafat pants, pulls her pistol, and yells: “Here we meet our truck. The Gryphon’s reach is long, even in a hurricane. Be prepared to fight.”

  I flex my fingers, try to make them work. “Gimme a gun.”

  She doesn’t. No truck arrives.

  We carry the canoes higher, then crawl into a deep cave, its mouth shielded from the hurricane. The women pull the canoes in with us, explaining that we will hide behind them.

  At the back wall, we sit and shiver against one another. The woman on my right pulls a small light stick out of her pack and pops it. The cave illuminates to a dim, eerie green. Hurricane Lana roars outside. Lightning flashes at the mouth. The cave’s depth kills much of the roar.

  The women discuss something in Kreyol. Their tone is sharp, clipped with anger and fear, but uses an educated diction that I noticed back at the road. All three wear the red armbands. Tafat’s two comrades eat food from one of the packs, curl up with their AKs, and pass out. My hands are cramped and shaking. We’ve been running eight hours. I’m beat to shit and hungry.

  Tafat hands me dried fish from the second pack. I devour it, lean back, and try to calm down. Tafat eats hers more slowly. I nod at her two comrades. “Question?”

  Tafat spits fish bones. If she had sunglasses and a porkpie hat, she’d be 100 percent night howler. But after eight hours together, cheating death six feet apart, she seems different. I say, “You look crazy. You live and work at ground zero for crazy. But you don’t sound crazy. And you’re damn good in the river. I don’t get it.”

  No reaction.

  Her face is a mess, a combination of high and low cheekbones, thin and full lips. Swollen, but not, like someone beat seven shades of shit out of her and she never recovered. She continues not to answer, a pair of white eyes in the dim green of the light stick.

  I lean toward her. “Whatever you know about me, we both know I’m not going to Kolonèl Idamante. Before we get out of that last river, if I can’t run, I’m killing all three of you.”

  Blank face. “I know you will try.”

  “Try? Like you said, roll the boat, we both drown. I’d rather drown.”

  She nods. “Yes. There are worse deaths than drowning.”

  No shit. But drowning isn’t a childhood aspiration either. “Up in Chicago, on Saturday, four shooters tried to kidnap me. They’re from here?”

  Tafat’s chin rises.

  “There was a similarity to you, two of them . . .”

  “I was their English teacher.” Tafat pushes off the cave wall, crawls over the canoes to the edge of the cave’s protection, unzips her pants, and pisses an arc downwind. She zips the pants and returns. Seated, she says, “The similarity you search for is born a man.”

  I look like I don’t quite get it, because I don’t.

  “Some of us are the ‘third sex,’ common in Southeast Asia, Polynesia, and India, although each call us by different names.”

  “The third sex? Why here? I mean, with Piccard?”

  “Not Piccard. In poor countries, people are a commodity. In all their forms, alive and dead. Men and boys in the prisons, in the street. Women, children, are sold to brokers to be slaves, ‘servants’ for the rich. In Haiti this is called restaveks. Others are kidnapped from families who would not sell, then sold by the Tontons Macoutes to the Gryphon. Some of his children become soldiers, Tontons, as they do in Africa and Mexico. The ways of the pirate are all they will know.

  “Others, those deemed more valuable, are given hormones and education, schooled in the ways of India and Pakistan’s hijras and the fa’afafine of Samoa. If we show promise in those years, we undergo surgical procedures. Those of us who do well in the surgeries, and who do not grow too large, are groomed with great attention until twelve or thirteen, then sold or gifted as companions and entertainers for the wealthy and powerful . . . in those markets where such gifts foster closer relationships. A profitable business with a thousand years of history.”

  “No shit, that’s for real? A guy told me about it in Morocco thirty years ago. I thought he was drunk.”

  Tafat blinks her unlevel eyes. “How American you are. The world does not operate on wealthy Western standards. The world operates on famine and murder. Extreme conditions create extreme responses. I, we—the failed Exquisites”—she nods to her comrades—“are but one of those responses.”

  “But you’re still here, not in the Middle East, North Africa, or Eastern Europe.”

  “My surgeries were unsuccessful.” She shrugs wide shoulders. “The surgeon, then at Dimanche, had his own problems. As a result, I was not attractive and grew too large to be valuable as an Exquisite.” She pulls up her shirt and shines a penlight on what might be a small raised E intertwined with a cross under her left arm.

  I squint to see—has to be the brand Lieutenant Waz described on two of the dead shooters at Nick & Nora’s. I refocus on Tafat’s botched face. “Sorry if I offended you.”

  She shrugs again. “I understood you were an educated man.”

  I laugh. “Piccard tell you that?”

  “Devereux.”

  “How bad was it for her?”

  “This time, or the last?”

  Swallow. Maybe I don’t want to know. “Susie and Piccard had some kind of CIA history. How’s she figure with the Gryphon?”

  Tafat thinks about it. “The Gryphon is empire, nothing more; built upon the same principles that colonized much of the world.” Tafat thumbs a vein in her arm. “The early red market for Haitian blood was not the Gryphon’s or Luckner Cambronne’s invention, it was yours, as is the market in rendition, cocaine, kidneys, and bones. The rich harvest the poor. East to west. Europe and America call it capitalism.”

  “Marx and Lenin. If we don’t drown, you’ll make a good rebel.”

  “No. Here, it is Mackandal and Boukman. And yes, all failed Exquisites will make good rebels, as will much of Ayiti. And soon.”

  “What’s it like, being an Exquisite?”

  Tafat looks away into the canoes and the storm beyond. “If we fail in the transition but can rise to teacher, interrogator, assassin, courier, or ship captain, we gain access to the Gryphon’s haut monde or his Praetorian Guard and, to some extent, flourish.”

  “Except you stole me from him for the Rebelyon.”

  “As captains, couriers, or assassins, we see the outside world when others do not. Some failed Exquisites begin to hate what we are, what we are part of.” Tafat glances at her comrades. “Some do not, like those who hunt us now. They lack my experience and education. Their loyalty is what you saw on the dock.”

  “The dock wasn’t third-world bona fides; it was Jim Jones.”

  Tafat shrugs. “All the Gryphon’s products are for export.”

  “Export or not, it looks like slavery and murder.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, and slavery and murder are underneath your brightest lights and softest sheets; the clothes you wear; the fruit you eat; the organs you buy; and the covert intelligence you solicit to defend it all.”

  “And your Kolonèl Idamante’s different? He’s gonna fix all that?”

  “Fix? Fix is a Western concept taught in movie houses. Go to sleep. We have more river ahead. Should our truck come, it will be when the hurricane’s eye is upon us.”

  “We’re gonna do the last lap in the eye of a hurricane? You gotta be shitting me.”

  Tafat pulls the AK barrel up between her legs and leans into the cave wall. “I wish Ayiti to be free. Of all her demons. For that I will take the chance. And so will you.”

  ***

  Silence—the absence of muffled roar—shocks me awake.

  Tafat is standing, wiping sleep from her misshapen eyes. She toes the boot soles of her comrades. They jolt awake. She says to me, “If the truck survived, it comes now from a farm close by. We must get the canoes to the road.”

  Beyond the canoes, the cave’s mouth is bathed in an ethereal moonlight . . . like we’re down the rabbit hole with Alice. No wind; no rain; no birds; no insects. Dead silent; strange beyond what I can describe. I crawl out with Tafat and the first canoe, set it down, and stand into—

  Holy shit.

  The trees are snapped and shredded, half of them flat in every direction. The ground is naked rock. The air is odorless, absolutely still. I peek over the deep canyon’s ledge. Far below us, whitewater crashes over and through the boulders, current that would make matchsticks of a battleship. The river we’re headed to has got to be better or we’re DOA from go.

  To our west, the sky is infinity black. That would be the storm wall that just passed. To the east, the sky is stars and a crescent moon. Some number of miles farther east is the other side of the eye wall: Cat 3 winds, 111 miles per hour or worse. The eye could be ten miles wide or it could be a hundred. If it’s ten miles, Tafat says we have one hour.