Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Guy Lamot said angrily, "You should tell your readers how Jean-Claude had the audacity to declare a special Tonton Macoute day to honor his army of thugs! My God, what insolence!"

  Carita nodded. "I have."

  It became a kind of game, as others joined in to make suggestions. As it continued, though, Ginette's lawyer husband took the lead and became the most aggressive. Carita's book, he insisted, must tell the world how the father of the President's wife had gone from buying and selling coffee to trafficking in cocaine for Columbian drug dealers. How even the Peligre Dam in the Artionite, once the country's shining hope for something approaching agricultural sufficiency, had been made useless by soil washed into it from mountainsides stripped of their trees.

  Bitterness caused his lips to tremble as he turned to Lee.

  "The other day I was handed a recent map showing how our forests have all but disappeared. Do you remember the beautiful southern mountains you and Carey walked across just before you were married? If the map is correct, to repeat that journey today would break your hearts."

  "So I've heard," Carey said.

  "Did you climb Macaya that time? The high point of the Massif?"

  "No, but we passed close to it."

  "The map indicates even much of it has been stripped. And now we are hearing that Duvalier himself is involved in this national suicide. Even while begging for foreign handouts to restore our forests, he has been secretly allowing cronies to strip the few that remain."

  "Guy," Georges Beaulieu said quietly, with a frown.

  "Yes?"

  "Do you say these things in public?"

  "I suppose I do, sometimes. Why?"

  "Be careful, friend. Even the sidewalks have ears these days."

  "But, damn it, Georges, someone has to tell the truth about what's going on, and Carita must make this book of hers count for something! This poor, struggling country doesn't need another book about Mardi Gras parades and voodoo ceremonies staged for tourists. We must let the world know what's being done to us!"

  "But—"

  "No!" Guy made a fist of his right hand and hammered the palm of his left with it. "The world has to know that the father and brother of our First Lady are involved in the cocaine traffic. That cocaine is everywhere for sale here. That our La Saline is one of the world's worst slums. That our Fort Dimanche is a house of horrors. That our President has a private army of thugs more vicious and more sadistic than even Hitler's Gestapo."

  This time it was Guy's wife who tried to interrupt. "But, Guy—"

  "I say no. Ask Vern about the drug trafficking. Back in '82 his American agents arrested Duvalier's brother-in-law in Puerto Rico and jailed him. Columbian drug planes are using our airport. People tell me that even Haiti Air—our own national airline, for God's sake—is involved in drug-running for the Columbians."

  "And Jean-Claude's father-in-law controls Haiti Air," Carey added dryly.

  "Everything you've said is no doubt true, Guy," Odette Beaulieu gently interjected," but I hope Carita will also say something about the goodness of our people. Our country people, I mean. Have you written about the pig-killing, Carita?"

  "The swinefever thing, you mean?"

  "When every pig in Haitihad to be destroyed, yes. Remember, all those pigs were paid for in cash before they were put to death, which means that the Americans and Canadians who did the work had to carry large sums of money all over the country with them. Yet not one of them ever said he was robbed or harmed. I think the readers of your book should be told that."

  "So do I."

  "But as for you, Guy—" Odette shook her head. "Much as I love you, I think Georges is right. You must be careful what you say in public. Not that we don't agree with you. We do. Of course we do! But it is not safe to speak out against what is happening."

  "And that," Lee said, "isenough about politics for awhile, don't we all agree? Who's for a drink?"

  "Lee, we're out of ice," Carey said.

  "Out of ice?" Guy Lamot shed his frown and, with a laugh, waved his hands. "There's a fridge full of it at our house, and my car's at the end of the driveway." He strode to the door, turned with a grin to add, "Patience!" and was gone. Ginette and he lived only two streets distant.

  While awaiting his return, the others talked to Carita and Vern about their wedding plans. Fifteen minutes or more passed before Ginette said with a frown, "Now what's keeping that man of mine, do you suppose?"

  "Yes," Lee echoed with a frown. "What can be keeping him?"

  The conversation died down. Except for an occasional brief remark, they waited in silence, becoming more and more uneasy as time passed. When the uneasiness became apprehension, Carey said, "I'd better go find out what's wrong, don't you think?"

  Ginette followed him out to his car and got in beside him without comment. In front of her home they found Guy's car parked and empty, with the driver's door open. A look of panic touched the face of the missing man's wife as they hurried to the house.

  That door was locked. Ginette's hand shook as she took a key from her handbag and unlocked it.

  The house was empty.

  In the morning, with her father at her side, Ginette Lamot reported her husband's disappearance to the police and begged their help in finding him. They responded with shrugs.

  "Perhaps he has fled the country, madame," said a captain who remainedslouched behind his desk. "It would seem some are doing that in the false belief that America has more to offer them. If I hear anything, I will of course inform you."

  For seventeen days the whereabouts of Guy Lamot remained a mystery. When not searching the city for him with the help of her family and friends, Ginette sat at home and waited in vain for something to happen. She lost weight. The brightness faded from her eyes. In appearance she aged ten years.

  Seventeen days. Then at three in the morning the telephone rang in the bedroom of Lee and Carey Aldred. Sleepily, Lee disengaged herself from Carey's embrace—she had fallen asleep in his arms—and reached for it.

  The voice was Ginette's. "Lee, he's home! He just walked in! But oh, my God, what they've done to him! Please, we need you and Carey. Please hurry. Please . . .”

  "Stay calm," Lee said. "We'll be there in in minute."

  All the lights were on in the Lamot home when Carey sent the car growling into the driveway. Ginette, throwing the front door open, wore a white nightgown blotched with blood. Frantically she led them to a room where her husband lay naked on a bed, with a basin of pink water and a wet towel beside him.

  "I've been trying to clean him up. Look at him. Look at what they've done to him." There were no exclamation points in her voice now. She spoke in a moan of horror.

  While Lamot lay there gazing at them with the eyes of a dying animal, Carey sat on the edge of the bed to examine him. For long moments no one spoke. Then, "He should be in a hospital," Carey said, "but I'm afraid if we try to take him to one, there could be complications—and I don't mean only physical ones." Leaning forward, he brought his lips closer to the man's face. "Can you hear me, Guy? Can you tell me where it hurts most?"

  Lamot willed the fingers of his right hand to walk across his body to his groin. His lips struggled to move. Almost inaudibly he whispered, "They—kept—hitting me—here."

  So it went for two hours, as the man drifted in and out of consciousness. Despite the massive bruises and jagged lacerations, there appeared to be no bones broken, Carey decided, but damage of that kind could not be ruled out without X-rays. After being cared for, Lamot slept. When he awoke at nine in the morning, Lee and Carey were still there. After sipping some broth, the beaten man haltingly began to tell what had happened.

  Two men in ordinary clothes had been waiting at the gate that evening when he drove home for the ice. Before he realized why they were there, one had opened the door of the car and both of them dragged him out. They marched him down the street a hundred yards to a black sedan in which a third man was waiting. He was taken to Fort Dimanche and accus
ed of plotting with others to overthrow the government.

  When he denied it, four men took turns beating him, saying they would beat him to death unless he divulged the names of his accomplices. There was nothing he could tell them because the charge was untrue, so they beat him unconscious. When he came to, he was in a cell.

  "There must have been—oh, God—more than thirty lost souls in that single cell, all packed in together," he said, groaning at the memory. "All of us were dead men and knew it. We had to take turns lying down on the floor to sleep; there wasn't room for all of us to do it at the same time. We were naked. The place was full of crawly things that drove us half crazy. The food—the slop they fed us wasn't fit for pigs. And all the time, day after day, the beatings went on. If I hadn't had Ginette to think about, I would have begged one of the others to kill me, though I doubt any of them would have had the strength to do it."

  "You were there the whole seventeen days you were missing?" Carey asked.

  "The whole time—naked, stinking to high heaven, tortured every day. When ordinary beatings didn't make me tell them what they wanted to hear, they tortured me in other ways. They bend you over a wooden bar and tie your wrists and ankles together, and then when they club you on the back, you think everything inside you is being reduced to pulp. You hate them with a passion—God in heaven, how you hate them! —but you can't do a thing about it, and that makes everything even worse. My God, I can't believe my country has come to this. I just don't understand how we ever created such monsters."

  "Yet you escaped," Carey said in awe. "How did you escape?"

  "It wasn't an escape. Almost every day in that place, people die and a truck comes to pick up the corpses. We talked about it.

  We asked one another when it would be our turn to be thrown onto the truck and hauled away. We wondered where the bodies were taken.

  "Then one night while I was being tortured, I passed out. I still don't remember being taken back to the cell or what happened there. Probably I was just dumped on the floor, and when the truck came in the morning they thought I was dead and threw me onto it. I came to in—" Guy shuddered so violently he had to stop talking.

  Carey leaned toward him as he lay on the bed. "You came to where?"

  "I don't know where. It was a big hole scooped out of the earth somewhere, and it was full of bodies. Probably a bulldozer or something was supposed to come and cover us up, but hadn't got there yet. At first I wanted just to shut my eyes again and die along with the rest, but then I wanted out. God, how I wanted out! And by crawling over dead bodies I finally got out, and started walking. Every few minutes I'd fall down and have to crawl; then I'd get up again. I had to put that charnel place behind me, don't you see? I had to get away from it. Then I suppose I reached some place I recognized, and found my way home from there."

  "Obviously they think you're dead. What will you do now?"

  "Yes . . . what now? Until there's a change of government here, we're not safe in this house, either of us. We've got to getout of Haiti. I don't know how we'll do it, but we've got to! And you—what about you and Lee and your children?"

  "I suppose we ought to get out too." Carey stood there beside the bed, scowling down at him. "But never mind that now. I think I might have a solution to your problem. It will take a few days, so let's get you and Ginette over to our house while I work on it—right? You'll be safe there. Our servants won't talk." He turned to Ginette. "Ginny, while Lee helps me get him out to the car, why don't you pack a suitcase with what you'll want to take with you?"

  "Take with us where?"

  "The States."

  Her eyes widened. "We can't go to the States just like that! We don't have visas! And even if Vern could get them for us, the airport is always crawling with Duvalier's people. We would never get on a plane!"

  Carey touched her on the hand. "I know. But people are arriving in the States without visas all the time now. Go on, Ginny. Just put your very personal things—whatever you and he can't bear to leave behind—into a single suitcase."

  With Lee's help he carried Guy Lamot to the car and made him as comfortable as possible on the rear seat. When Ginette came with the suitcase, he put that in the trunk. For a moment Ginette stood there in the driveway, half blinded by her tears as she silently bade her home farewell. She and her husband owned this house; Guy had bought it the week before they were married. Then she got into the front seat with Lee and Carey, and Carey drove home.

  That night Carey drove to the home of a peasant patient of his in the city's Bel Air slum, picked the man up, then continued on with him to Leogane, a seacoast town some twenty miles out on the southern peninsula. There at two in the morning they talked for an hour with the man's brother, in the cabin of a sailing ship the brother owned. Money changed hands.

  A week later, when the ship departed at night with some twenty Haitians aboard, Ginette and Guy Lamot were on it. In the Bahamas they transferred with the other passengers to a faster, better-built ship that carried them to the east coast of Florida.

  There in predawn darkness the Lamots were met by a tall, silver-haired man who introduced himself as the father of Dr. Carey Aldred and gravely shook their hands. °Lifting their single suitcase, he led them to a waiting car and introduced them to a handsome, white-haired woman—Carey's mother—who waited there.

  An hour or so later, just as dawn was breaking, they arrived at the Aldreds' home in Fort Lauderdale—in the United States illegally and with an uncertain future, but at least safe from torture and death in a Duvalier prison.

  3

  "It's time we quit, love," Roddy Bennett said. "There's no use hoping things will get better here."

  Olive looked at him in sadness. At four-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, with a profitless year nearing its end and bookings the lowest they had ever been, the two walked slowly back to Le Refuge after an hour at the shore. At fifty-two, the oldest son of Lyle and Alison Bennett was still tall, straight, and handsome. At fifty, his five-foot-three wife was still prettier than many of the women who came to Le Refuge as guests.

  At the beach they had not been swimming—only sitting there in a patch of purple shade cast by raisin-la-mer bushes while discussing their problems and trying to arrive at a decision about their future. Except for themselves, the little beach had been deserted.

  "Time to quit?" Olive stopped and looked up at him. "You mean it, don't you?"

  "Don't you agree with me?"

  "Well"—she sighed—"I suppose so, though I hate to say it. This year may have been bad financially, but our life here hasn't been boring, you know."

  That, at least, was a thing to remember, she told herself.

  And it was important, wasn't it? The lives of so many who came here were boring; to know it, all you had to do was talk to them awhile.

  From the beginning Le Refuge had attracted a kind of tourist who wanted something more unpredictable than, say, a week in Miami Beach. When you probed for the reasons why, you discovered that what they really sought was a venturesome break in their day-to-day routine. Not a permanent break, of course. Good heavens, no! Obviously, two Americans who would give up the luxuries and stability of the States to run a resort hotel in a country such as Haiti were more than a little crazy.

  Well . . . if that was what they thought, they were probably right, weren't they? You did have to be a little crazy. But it hadn't been dull, ever. Frustrating, perhaps. Even frightening at times. But not dull.

  Still, almost every day now the problems seemed harder to handle. Perhaps, as Roddy suggested, it really was time to pull up stakes and try for something less strenuous back in the States.

  "Do you think we'll be able to find a buyer?" she asked the man at her side.

  "Who knows? But look at it this way." Roddy reached for her hands. "The hotel is old now, love. If we stay on here we're going to have to put a lot of money into sprucing it up. With the country getting such a rotten reputation and tourists staying away in droves, we might never
earn that money back. I say if we don't find a buyer after giving it an honest try, we ought to clear out anyway." When she only continued to look at him, he added, "We have enough put away for a fresh start somewhere else, you know."

  "And you don't think things will improve here?"

  "Not while Baby Doc is in charge. Not a chance."

  "Well . . ."

  "I'll start the wheels turning tomorrow." He drew her into his arms and kissed her, then stepped back and looked at her again. He was relieved, she thought. For the first time in weeks, he seemed almost happy.

  The three men arrived in a black limousine an hour or so later and came into the bar. That in itself was not unusual. There was no better watering hole this side of Cap Haitien, and casual visitors often dropped in to satisfy their thirst. But while these three were on their second round of drinks, Olive happened to walk through the bar and saw them sitting there.

  Her nod as the owner's wife was polite enough, but when she stepped into Roddy's office a moment later her face was pale and she was trembling.

  "Roddy, one of them is here again!"

  Looking up from some paperwork he was doing, Roddy gave her an exaggerated blank stare. It was something of a joke between them, the way Olive so often expected him to know her thoughts.

  "Those men who roughed up Sharon!" she said. "Don't you remember? The four bastards who threatened to gang-rape her on the beach?"

  As Roddy got to his feet, his expression quickly changed to one of fury. "You mean they're back?"

  "One of them is. With two other men. They're in the bar." Suddenly, by his expression, she realized she might have ignited a fuse that would set off an explosion. "Now don't confront them!" she begged. "Remember, Dela said those four were Tontons!"

  The word “Tontons” did it; almost visibly, the fuse sputtered and went out. "Are they drunk?" Roddy said.

  "No. I don't think so. I mean I didn't speak to them—I was just walking through—so I don't know."

  "I'll keep an eye on them."

  "Would it—would it do any good to call the police, do you suppose?"