by Gregg Loomis
Gurt came up beside him, her hair still wet and gathered in a bun. “Is beautiful, no?”
Lang noticed she had changed into a skirt out of respect for the natives. Extending an arm around her waist, he pulled her up beside him. “Is beautiful, yes.”
For a moment neither spoke. Then Lang pointed toward the range of jagged mountains behind the town. “What is that?”
Gurt squinted. “I see only mountains.”
Lang took her by the shoulders, positioning her so she could look down his arm as if it were a gun sight. “Right there, on top of one of the peaks.”
“You mean the little square knob?”
Lang nodded, gratified she could see it, too. “Yeah. What do you suppose that is?”
“A mountain?”
“When’s the last time you saw a perfectly square mountain peak?”
“It might just appear square from this angle.”
He took her hand. “Let’s go down to the town and look around.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I think I saw all of it I wanted on the way up here.”
Lang chuckled. “Hey, you’re the one that wanted to come to Haiti.”
She sighed. “OK, but just for a short while. It is hot here.” She pointed. “Down there, hotter.”
On the way to the road up which Lang had pushed the taxi, Lang stopped at the desk.
The same young woman looked up. “May I help you, Mr. Lowen?”
“A question. Actually, several. First, what’s worth seeing down in the town?”
She pursed her lips in thought. “I recommend the marketplace. You will see all sorts of native foods and goods. You might also want to look at the church. The carved wooden doors are considered to be works of art. And speaking of art, you will find a number of art shops.”
“We were on our balcony and I noted the mountains south of town. There seems to be a square structure of some sort on top of one of them. What is it?”
Her face screwed up in thought. “A structure? On top of one of the mountains? You must be mistaken. There is nothing in those mountains other than a few mud huts.”
“As I said, it just looks square,” Gurt added.
Hand in hand, Gurt and Lang stepped from the area of the desk into the searing sunlight on the road. Immediately, a group of four or five men who had been sitting in the shade of a mahogany tree jumped to their feet and came trotting over.
“Need guide?”
“Very best guide, sir, madam.”
“Show you Cap Haitien? Five dollar, American.”
Lang had heard about these “guides.” A tour of the local area was their secondary function. The primary duty was to keep at bay the child beggars and overly aggressive vendors that swarmed the few tourists like flies to rancid meat. He selected the youngest of the group. A man-boy, really-whose legs were visibly twisted by pellagra, polio or some other symptom of dietary deficiency and the country’s lack of health care. Only two canes allowed him to walk, an exaggerated swagger that was painful to watch.
“How much?” Lang wanted to know as the other candidates sullenly retreated back to the shade.
“Five dolla, American.”
That seemed to be the standard price.
“What’s your name?”
“Paul.”
“OK, Paul, what are you going to take us to see?”
“We go market, church.” He nodded toward Gurt. “Then lady shop.”
Despite the horribly malformed legs of his guide, Lang was having to walk quickly to keep up with Paul, whose adeptness with his walking sticks would have been admired by a Special Olympics athlete.
Lang touched his arm, stopping him about halfway down the hill and pointing. “Paul, can you see that square thing on top of the mountain?”
The afternoon haze made the mountains little more than shadows but Paul immediately saw what Lang was talking about. “Citadelle.”
“Citadelle?”
Paul nodded vigorously. “After French leave Haiti, Henri Christophe no want them to come back. Build Citadelle.”
“Ah,” Lang exclaimed. “So, it’s a fortress of sorts.” He looked closer. “But what is it, twenty miles away? It could hardly protect the town from that distance.”
Paul treated Lang to a grin. “Christophe not defend town. Plan was to burn it and all crops, then go where big French guns could not reach: top of the mountain, where he could exist with five thousand people for a year, block mountain pass to interior of country. You want to see? I can arrange.”
Sound military strategy, Lang thought. Leave the invading French with nothing but ruins, nothing to sustain their army that they hadn’t brought themselves. “Yes, I’d like that. But, Paul, is this Citadelle something everyone around here knows about?”
Paul studied Lang’s face for a second as though he thought Lang might be joking. “Everyone know about Citadelle, yes.”
“OK. How do we get there?”
“Take taxi most of way. Last mile or two be by horse.”
“Can we go now?” Gurt asked. “I’ll need to change into pants.”
Paul nodded. “Twenty minutes. Cab be at hotel. We go.”
Gurt and Lang watched him move down the hill with both a speed and agility that belied his deformity before they turned to climb back toward their room.
“Why do you suppose the woman at the front desk said there was nothing up in those mountains but mud huts?” Lang pondered.
“Perhaps she was ignorant,” Gurt suggested.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“Maybe she did not want us to be spending money outside the hotel.”
A logical answer but not one Lang believed any more than the first.
Minutes later, he was watching Gurt wriggle into a pair of jeans. “Do you always buy them so tight?”
She inhaled to button the front. “They shrink after the first washing.”
“So why not buy a size larger?”
Gurt sniffed, the answer obvious to any woman. “Because I wear a size eight or ten. If I bought a size larger, everyone would think I was getting fat.”
Lang knew better than to pursue that. Instead, he said, “I’m not happy about having to ride horses.”
Gurt inhaled again, this time for the zipper’s benefit. “The exercise will do you good.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like anything both bigger and dumber than I am.”
Milo, Haiti
An hour and a half later
Lang need not have worried about something bigger than he was. The horses gathered around a central corral were smaller than most burros. Astride one, his feet cleared the ground only by inches. The worn saddle did little to protect him from the razor back of his mount.
The town, Milo, was a small agricultural community of wooden huts amid small fields of coffee plants and banana trees. Several sheets spread on the ground displayed reddish beans that would turn chocolate brown as they dried. A second source of income was tourism or, as Paul explained, had been, before the fall of the last Duvalier over twenty years ago had precipitated a series of leaders, elected or otherwise, who were soon ousted by the next aspirant to power.
The three, Paul, Lang and Gurt, set off uphill on their diminutive mounts.
Gurt held her reins loosely. “It is as if they know where we go.”
Paul gave her a smile. “The only trip they know, here to the Citadelle and back. If you let go, they go there and return.”
Within minutes, the trail passed massive ruins of stone. At one time a structure far larger than anything Lang had seen in Haiti had been there.
Paul noted his interest. “Palace of Sans Souci, built by Christophe between 1810 and 1813. When he committed suicide, people pull down most of the buildings and earthquake in 1842 pull down whatever left.”
Past the sloping field on which the former palace was located, the path narrowed and began to rise sharply. Lang was beginning to wish he had brought a sweater. The air was no longer pr
egnant with moisture, but cool to the skin. They were sheltered from the sun by increasing vegetation on each side of the trail. Vines bigger around than Lang’s arm swooped low from massive branches of trees he could not identify. Unseen birds chattered in impenetrable shadows. Clearly this part of Haiti had not been deforested. At irregular intervals, the trio passed tiny mud huts squatting amid a row or two of stunted corn. Their arrival prompted naked children playing homemade flutes and drums to dance for coins tossed from horseback. Mangoes and stubby green bananas seemed to flourish without cultivation. Smiling women with huge jugs of water on their heads danced down the ragged path with steps as light as they were sure.
Twice Lang pulled his little horse to a stop and listened. He was certain he had heard something behind them, the ring of a steel shoe striking a rock, the whinny of a horse. He did not recall seeing any other tourist in Milo, and he was fairly certain no Haitian would ride up to the Citadelle for the fun of it. There was something wrong, though he could not have enunciated exactly what.
Squeezing between Gurt’s horse and the encroaching growth to ride side by side, he watched Paul in the lead. His bent, crooked legs seemed to present no impediment to his riding. In fact, he looked more comfortable than Lang felt.
Leaning over to place his mouth next to her ear, he said, “Someone is following us.”
“Following?” she repeated. “It is the only path through the forest. Anyone coming this way would use it.”
“But why would they come this way at all?” Lang argued. “I imagine everyone around here has been up to the old fort as many times as they might wish.”
“And you intend to do what?”
Lang slid from his horse, handing the reins to Gurt. “I intend to see who’s shadowing us. Go about another hundred yards and wait for me.”
“Lang…”
Before she could voice an objection, he had used a hanging vine to climb into the dense leaves of an ironwood tree. She shook her head slowly and led his horse away.
Lang did not have long to wait. Gurt had just vanished into the twilight of the natural canopy of vegetation when two horsemen appeared. They both were dressed in khaki uniforms, and both had sidearms in covered holsters. Despite the meager light, both wore reflective sunglasses. They passed within five feet of Lang. He watched them go, then dropped to the trail and followed. With the steep grade, the horses’ pace was easily one he could match.
He had been trailing them only a couple of minutes when the junglelike growth stopped as abruptly as the opening of a stage curtain. The two horsemen were silhouetted against a gray background that ebbed and flowed like running water. It took Lang a second to realize that he was at an altitude that touched the clouds.
A whiff of a breeze and the gray parted, revealing a sight he would not soon forget. Where the dense vegetation ended, it opened onto the open vista of a rocky meadow ending in a peak. Perched like a ship on an ocean wave, a massive stone structure stuck its bow into a sea of swirling mist. Lang had seen many forts, but never one with a shiplike prow. The object of fortification was not only to protect but provide a platform for heavy artillery, weaponry that could be concentrated on the enemy’s positions. Here, the pointed bow achieved the opposite effect, diffusing rather than concentrating fire. But it made little difference, Lang could see. The fortress sat on a bluff with a straight drop-off on three sides. The only approach was the narrow path no more than two feet wide that crowned the slope up to the Citadelle’s gate. A misstep would result in a fall of a thousand feet or more.
He could see Gurt and Paul waiting along this path, their horses nibbling at what little vegetation poked through the rocky surface. Then they disappeared in swirling gray cloud. By the time Lang could see Gurt and Paul again, the two horsemen he was following had reached them. Paul was engaged in an animated conversation. A few yards farther along toward the massive structure, two more men in uniform were approaching on horseback from the fort.
The two new arrivals reached the group at the same time as Lang. The discussion stopped and everyone turned to look at him, the only person not mounted.
“Tell them I had to answer the call of nature,” Lang said to Paul, swinging back onto the little horse.
Although he was unable to understand the words, Lang could tell Paul was unhappy at what the men were telling him. The tone was getting angry and the gestures increasingly aggressive.
“What are they saying?” Gurt asked.
Paul took a deep breath. “Say we cannot enter Citadelle. Is dangerous, floors and walls not safe. We must go back. These men have orders not to allow anyone inside.”
“The place has been there for nearly two hundred years,” Lang argued, “and it’s just now unsafe?”
“Go!” One of the men was pointing in the direction of Milo, perhaps exhausting his entire English vocabulary.
Lang took a long last look at the amazing structure perched on its lofty height. He could see guns of different sizes bristling through ports. The walls of stone rose well over a hundred feet and were smooth even though they had withstood the elements for nearly two centuries.
“Go now!”
The man knew more English than Lang had anticipated.
It was obvious no amount of argument was going to change the minds of these uniforms. Gurt reached into her purse and produced a twenty-dollar bill. In these latitudes, dead American presidents frequently spoke with more authority than mere orders.
The response was silent stares from four pairs of sunglasses.
Lang pulled the reins to his left. The little horse took dainty, careful steps to turn around on the narrow path. The animal was not only as small as a burro but just as surefooted.
“No point in arguing,” he said sourly. “Let’s go.”
In single file, they reentered the coolness of the tropical forest. It was not until they were almost back to Milo that the trail permitted two riders side by side.
Gurt reined her horse in to let Lang catch up to her. “You do not plan to see this marvelous place, this Citadelle?”
Lang’s response was a grunt. “First the woman at the hotel has never heard of the biggest attraction in Haiti, perhaps the whole Caribbean, and then we find at least four armed cops, militia, whatever, guarding the place to keep away the tourists for which the country is starving. I’d say there’s something there more important than tourist dollars, something someone doesn’t want seen.”
Gurt smiled knowingly. “I suppose we have shopping to do, as Paul suggested.”
“Indeed we do.”
Cap Haitien
20:29 that evening
For dinner, Lang and Gurt had shared a pot of tenaka soup, vegetables done in an oxtail broth. She had the poulet kreyol, he the griot, a highly spiced pork, all washed down with icy bottles of Prestige, Haiti’s beer, served in different-sized and different-shaped bottles clearly recognizable from their former lives as containing Budweiser, St. Pauli Girl, Coors and a number of other brands stamped on the bottom of the glass, a model of recycling but more a tribute to the Haitian mentality of wasting nothing. The meal was served at the hotel’s open-air restaurant beside the pool. Lang had warned Gurt to forgo the salad on the theory that in third world countries, that which isn’t bottled, cooked or canned can lead to irresistible impulses to inspect plumbing facilities.
Even if there are none immediately available.
Retreating to the lobby, another open room furnished in native carved mahogany, Lang treated himself to a Cuban cigar, a Montecristo #2. It had been his favorite smoke before Manfred’s arrival in his life had resulted in the secondhand-smoke treaty with Gurt, who had given up her beloved Marlboros.
“Do you not wish Cognac with that?” Gurt queried.
“Wish it?” Lang puffed contentedly. “You bet! But drink one? Not with what we have planned for the evening.”
Gurt lowered her voice even though the room was otherwise empty. “We have everything we need?”
Lang contempl
ated the glowing ash of his cigar tip. “We checked before dinner, remember?”
Gurt stood, giving Lang a seductive look. “I think I will take a nap. Perhaps you will join me?”
Lang eyed his cigar, barely half-smoked. “Perhaps you will wait a little?”
She twisted her hips suggestively. “Poor Lang. He must choose between two of his delights.”
“Haven’t you heard? The president of the United States has forbidden torture.”
Gurt parted her lips to run her tongue along them. “We are not in the United States.”
Lang brightened. “Which means there is no such thing as a ‘no smoking’ hotel room.” He stood. “Lead on, my lady! My cigar and I follow!”
She preceded him across a small but attentively landscaped courtyard, down stairs lit by gaslights, and stood in front of the door. Even in the poor light he could see her stiffen.
She turned and took the few steps required to stand beside him. “Someone is in our room.”
Lang’s joy of anticipation evaporated faster than early-morning dew in July. “You’re sure?”
“The tall tale…”
“Telltale, the little strip of tape under the doorknob.”
“It is gone.”
“Perhaps the maid, turning down the bed.”
“She did that while you were waiting for me at the restaurant.”
Lang slid by her, squatting beside the door. He listened for several minutes before rejoining her. “Whoever it is is still there. I can hear someone moving around.”
“We will have the hotel call the police.”
Lang thought of the woman behind the desk who might be the only person in Cap Haitien unaware of the Citadelle, remembered his remark at dinner with the waiter hovering nearby that he intended to enjoy a cigar in the lobby afterward. “Not so fast. It might be the hotel.”
“Lang, we cannot just burst into the room. He might be armed.”
