A Rendezvous in Haiti (11 page)

McAllister let him go and sucked down an inch of whiskey. “Martel was educated by Jesuits. He's not a brute. Captain: when will Wyatt be here?”

“Couple of hours. Coming for you.”

“Yes. I have to go to town.”

“Right. Colonel's cancelled all leave but he wants you there.”

“Hell with the colonel,” McAllister said. “I want to talk to a priest. I am no goddam use to anybody here and for that matter neither are you two.”

“We have a war to fight.”

“Fuck your war,” McAllister said, surprising himself; the words echoed from another, forgotten, quarrel long ago. He spat off the veranda. He stood at the railing and cursed, long and loud. “I'll kill them,” he said. Then he hunched like Lafayette and stood struggling with the pain.

Maps. Wyatt tracing his crisscrosses. “Mainly one or two Haitians beating a loaded donkey. Sometimes a cart. Piccaninnies herding goats. Had one parade over by that Deux Rochers, looked like voodoo, scattered when they saw me. Trouble is I don't know what to look for.”

“She may be in a shack in Port-au-Prince,” McAllister said.

“We'll hear,” Healy said. “They took her for a purpose and they'll tell us that purpose. Stands to reason.”

“Reason! Wyatt: let's go.”

“What do you want with a priest?” Healy asked.

“To find out where she is,” McAllister said. “If we go by the book she's dead.”

“We've offered a reward for information,” Colonel Farrell said. “Every gendarme knows and every agent and double-agent and triple-agent knows. It's a damn poor country and anybody at all is liable to tell us for money.”

“Including a lot of swindlers who know nothing, sir.”

“We've considered that. We're doing all we can. Colonel Barbour has flown to Southampton and boarded the
Massachusetts
; he'll proceed directly to Boston and try the rest by plane. I've ordered defensive patrols only. Washington is firm: we cannot, ah, offer a replacement. We cannot exchange an officer for her.”

“Money? Prisoners?”

“We may. It's not ruled out. But nothing can be done until—”

“Yes. I'd like permission to speak to Haitian friends, and I'd like an extended leave.”

“You're a serving officer, McAllister.”

“I'm sorry, Colonel, but this war doesn't mean a damn thing to me now.”

“I regret to hear that.” The colonel straightened, cold.

“It's an exercise, Colonel. It's like the Philippines and Nicaragua and Cuba and everywhere they send us—we don't give a damn about these people. We'll rule the world because there's nobody else left to rule it, and all we want from lesser breeds is respect for our law. Well, all I want from them is my girl.”

“We had best consider all that unsaid,” the colonel told him. “Your leave is granted; I'll inform Healy. If you plan to travel anywhere but here or Hinche, you will inform me. You will commit the Corps to nothing, is that understood?”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Don't lose your nerve, Lieutenant. You didn't lose your nerve in France.”

Port-au-Prince was a filthy teeming tropical city full of thieves and traitors. His small open carriage clopped through trash and excrement; exhausted old men lay at the roadside (there was no true gutter); every able-bodied Haitian might be a Caco and every door might hide a Caroline, bound and gagged. The stalls, picturesque a week ago, were now merely pathetic: contrived of planks, tin cans, cardboard boxes, offering catchpenny utensils or aging foodstuffs. And Caroline everywhere and nowhere—he grimaced, told himself to be calm, and unclenched his fists.

The cab halted, the horse drooped, the crowd gathered. McAllister asked, “On est chez le Père Scarron?”

The cabbie seemed a papery centenarian and was wearing a derby hat. The world was slipping away from McAllister; what was real here? The crowd muttered; a cry, B'jou le blanc! The old man assured him: it was Father Scarron's rectory.

What had McAllister expected? Spires? A porch? A majestic edifice of stone? The rectory was a pleasant, open, two-story tropical house with balconies on the three visible sides of the upper floor. He paid the cabbie and stepped to the door, with its crucifix: he was looking Christ in the eye. McAllister knocked.

In time a young man opened the door, perhaps a novice, a student. “Father Scarron, please. It's urgent.”

The young man bowed and showed him in. Thank God, thank God: the priest was at home and not off on a round of rural parishes. The room was spacious, cool, louvered. A salon, a wall of books. On another wall, a white wall, a map of Hispaniola: Haiti blue, San Domingo green, the sea yellow.

Scarron came forward briskly, but looked sleepless, malarial. They spoke each other's name and shook hands. “I'm sorry. I'm sick with shame, for all of us. Please sit. You'll take a glass?”

“Thank you.” McAllister set his broad-brimmed campaign hat on an end-table.

Scarron sent the young man for Pommard and two glasses. “I'm not sure I can tell you more than you know. She has been abducted. She was abducted by four Haitians who are presumed to be Martel's people. There has been no word since. Very likely she is on her way to Martel. A hostage.” He plucked at his soutane, scratched his cheek, glanced at the map.

“You must know more than that. Our yard-boy in Hinche knew that much.”

Scarron made no answer.

The priest was deeply perturbed; McAllister kept at him. “Martel. Is he a … is he a
moral
man, has he any sense of decency at all?”

“He had until the Jesuits got hold of him,” Scarron said. “Listen to me: he a serious man, a political leader, a general, and he and his staff can have a thousand women a night without her.”

“You do come to the point. Thanks,” McAllister said. “How long have you known him?”

“Twenty years, twenty-five.”

“Are you a Caco?”

Scarron said, “What!”

“I only want to know for tactical reasons. Put it another way: will he listen to you?”

“Saint Rita,” Scarron said. “The patron saint of the impossible. Now listen. You cannot know what levels of deception we wander through; of irony and condescension and native shrewdness. Let me tell you a story. Three or four years ago when your Major Butler was our dictator, the government was not legal because there were not enough cabinet members. You understand: it was a hazardous occupation. Smedley Butler had a Haitian aide, and asked him to nominate a minister. The aide did so, the government was installed, and Butler congratulated himself: he had cut a Gordian knot, and what did the Haitians know or care about process, law, precedent?”

“It was a start,” McAllister said.

“The new minister's first act was to draw an advance on his salary; his second was to repay a loan of fifty dollars in gold to Butler's aide. Shortly the government died of inanition. Whose was the more delicate sense of irony—Butler's? the aide's? the minister's?”

“You're being polite,” McAllister said. “You're trying to tell me I can't understand Haiti.”

“I'm trying to tell you that you cannot know what is at stake.”

“But I do know Americans,” McAllister said. “The Marines have a war to fight and very soon they'll be fighting it as they always do and never mind Caroline, but just now they're shocked, they've paused, and I want to use that pause. I want to go to Martel. I don't give a goddam about irony. I want
you
to go to Martel and do what must be done to bring her home.”

“And then leave Haiti, I suppose.”

McAllister was confused.

“What would become of me? The government would call me Caco; the Cacos would call me a white priest.”

“But it's a woman's life at stake!”

“A white woman's. Your woman's.”

“Yes. But you know her, she's a good woman, it isn't just that I love her, it's that she's
good
, and you're fond of her and why should she pay for my sins? You could go in mufti. Would that help?”

“Never. A priest out of uniform is behind the enemy lines in disguise. I am God's servant, not his spy. Ah, McAllister! Do you know what I am to Martel? Just another blanc. It is not always the skin, you see. When a coal-black Haitian attorney, in a suit from Paris and a cravat and gold pince-nez, comes to my door my house-boy announces, ‘C'est un blanc, mon père.'”

“Is there any other way?” McAllister asked. “My God, man, think of her out there!”

Scarron groaned, and aged before McAllister's eyes: crow's-feet, a downward wrinkle from the corner of the mouth. “You cannot know what you ask,” the priest said, “and I cannot refuse you.”

McAllister was again confused. He dismissed the riddles and concentrated on his one discovery: Scarron had not replied, “Impossible.”

“I can't speak for the Corps,” McAllister said, “but I'll fight like hell for whatever we need. An aircraft, gold, a truce, he can have me.”

“He won't bargain,” Scarron said. “He's a large man in all ways. He has no idea who his parents were but he is a man of breeding.”

“Yes. A well-bred gentleman who kidnaps young women. I'm sick of him. I'm tired of hearing he's God.”

“He's not my God,” Scarron said wearily, touching the black crucifix that lay against his white soutane. “My God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Michelangelo and Bach: all I want is the white past and a black future. But Haitians worship many gods, and Martel is one of them. He has known obscurity and resisted temptation and preached from the mountaintop. Now he is scourging the moneychangers and promising Haiti eternal life.”

The houseboy served wine, and the men sipped in silence.

After a time Father Scarron said, “We are an immensely proud people, and for over a century we have done nothing whatever to be proud of.”

6

Caroline Barbour had fallen asleep in a four-poster, safe within a cocoon of mosquito netting furnished by the Marine Corps; and she was born again in a shroud, in a wagon, in a tropical forest. In a stupor too: this was an unusually vivid nightmare, her limbs heavy, immobile, no escape. Aches and pains—her elbows, her hips, the back of her head—roused her further, and were replaced by nausea and then fear—a bolt of pure painful terror, like a thunderclap that stops the breath and freezes the heart.

She fumbled and groped: she was swathed in perhaps a sheet, and she was clothed in her own proper night-gown, and the soft parts of her body were warm and comfortable. She smelled horse; she tasted medicine. “I should scream,” she said aloud. But of course it was a dream, it must be: the sharp suffocating fear, and soon the surge of relief that left one limp. Yet she lay on a pallet that crackled softly, and she breathed in odors of the stable, and heard a musical Creole voice—and the cart creaked and groaned, and a beast staled, with a hissing spatter.

She was journeying through the night in a wagon. A gray sky, black boughs above: perhaps dawn, or a clouded moon.

She was too sleepy to scream. Yes. Too weary to understand. It would be all right. Something to do with Bobby. She was a princess clothed in cobwebs.

In memory she saw a vaulted ward, and ranks of beds, but she was not in Paris; she was immensely tired. She was also terribly afraid, but of what? No, this was not Paris, but the familiar odor, the ward—alcohol? ether? Haiti, yes, she was in Haiti, a tropical night, and dreaming. She shifted, and the pain died; she snuggled into the straw. “I am too tired to discuss it now,” she said aloud, and she dropped into the void.

She floated in light, squinted, and fear possessed her: she lay ice-cold in the tropical morning. “My God,” she cried, and struggled to sit; a headache stunned her like a blow. The green forest, a wagon creaking and groaning, a mule in the traces, two black men trudging before. One reached for the bridle, and the wagon halted; they contemplated Caroline. Behind her a voice said, “Allez, va,” and the two men returned to their trudging, one tugging briefly at the bridle.

Now her fear was like fire; she waited, breathing deeply; it burned itself out. The headache was murderous. “I am a colonel's daughter,” she said, and again in French.

Behind her a voice said, “Good morning.” She turned, and was dizzy.

A man on horseback tipped his sombrero politely, a white man.

Caroline was not prepared for this apparition, so she inspected him in silence. He was clean-shaved but for a generous mustache, and tanned or naturally swarthy. His features were bold, the thick black brows striking and the eyes a cold blue; he seem to be focusing on a point at the center of her forehead. He sat a horse well, and it was a fine horse he sat. Caroline said, “Good morning. Who are you?”

He might have frowned.

Caroline was quiet for a time: she wiped her eyes on the hem of her nightgown, and rubbed her teeth with a finger. Nature was kind, she realized: the truth was seeping slowly through her headache, and as she grew less numb—a drug, yes, a drug wearing off—she had time to rally. She remembered soldiers confiding, “At first, you see, I was in shock, so when they told me I had lost my legs I almost shrugged. Oh yes, lost my legs. Oh yes, it's raining. Oh yes, soup for supper. Then when I hated them for it and wanted to die, it was too late: I was stronger and wanted to live.” By the time she thought of rape she was Caroline again, groggy, doubtless dull of eye, nursing a terrible headache and a worse fear, but Caroline Barbour the famous colonel's daughter.

“I need to drink,” she said. “I need to wash.”

Their little caravan was pacing a trodden path, not much used but not overgrown. “There was a yellow butterfly,” a soldier had told her, “and as I could not move my limbs I resigned from the army and studied this butterfly.” Beside the trail grew oleander, and sometimes a tall red bush, virtually a tree, of bougainvillaea. Turtle-doves shot across their path, or rose in a flutter as the men and the mule approached. The sun had risen but was screened by the forest; the day was bright but still cool.