“Like a couple of kings,” Terry interrupted. “One day — one fine day — we’ll drive down that road and we’ll be like a couple of kings. Then when you and me — when we’ve got just about six marbles together rolling around upstairs, when we’re sitting in the nursing home and the nurses are changing our shitty-ass diapers, I’ll look at you and you’ll look at me, and we’ll just grin. Because we got that road built.”
Johel inhaled, started to say something, then stopped. His eyes glanced down at his wife’s hand. She was trembling very slightly, as if feverish.
Kay said, “Honey, what’s wrong?”
“This is no game,” Nadia said.
“Of course not, of course it’s not a game,” Kay said.
“For you this all some funny game. This some funny game you play, and if you win, you feel nice in your heart, and if you lose, you say, ‘Too bad.’ But you don’t know Haiti. Haiti is no funny game.”
Johel said something to Nadia in Creole. His voice was too soft for me to understand. She shook her head.
“She’s tired,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”
Kay said, “Don’t talk about her like she’s not even here, Johel. If she’s tired, she’ll say she’s tired.”
“Kay—,” Terry said.
“Kay what? Am I too tired also? Is that what you want to say?”
“Maybe we’re all a little tired,” I said. “I know I am.”
“Amen,” the judge said.
Terry said, “Listen. This is a decision, obviously this is a decision you guys got to make by yourselves. But I want to say one thing.”
“You—,” Nadia said.
“Just listen to me.”
“Where we gonna go now?” she said. “You tell me where. Where I gonna go now?”
“Just listen to me.”
“We all listen, listen, listen you. We don’t want to listen you no more.”
“Let him talk,” Johel said.
“The only place we go now is dead,” she said.
Terry ran his fingers through his hair. He said, “If this is about security, I will be with Johel every step of the way. Just listen to me. Haiti’s no game, but I’m not playing. Kay, you tell her — you tell Nadia that when I make a promise, I keep it. And I’m promising Nadia right here and now, win or lose, that she’s going to be just fine.”
“That’s true,” Kay said. “Nadia, you should know that. What Terry is saying is true.”
“What I’m saying is you either shit or you get off the pot,” Terry said. “Don’t just sit there squeezing.”
“Thank you, Terry, for that beautiful image,” Kay said.
“All I’m saying is that if you’re going to do this thing, do it. You’re not going to get a chance like this twice. Believe me, I know. And I want you to think long and hard how you’re going to feel in twenty-five years, you come back and the people are still dying and there’s still no road, and you think, Oh, I could have done that.”
The judge started to say something and stopped, then started to say something else and stopped again. He looked at his wife, whose eyes tenaciously sought the floor.
As we were leaving, Terry reached for the check.
“It’s on us,” he said.
It had been understood that we would all share the cost of the meal, with its rich food and many bottles of good wine. One by one the other guests had offered to contribute and Terry had waved them off. Now Terry made a gaudy, immodest gesture of pulling his credit card out of his wallet and presenting it with a flourish to the waiter. The pleasure he took in our thanks thereafter was evident: he had switched for the evening from cigarettes to cigars, and he puffed grandly as we shook his hand, his ruddy face enveloped in great clouds of Cuban tobacco.
I looked at Kay. She seemed delighted by the gesture, by her husband’s audacity, by the story it told of their success and generosity. “It’s our pleasure, really,” she said when Johel protested. “The only good thing about having a birthday is taking your friends out.” When Nadia thanked her, she said, “We’re just so happy you could come, honey. We love you and Johel so much.”
Where had that warmth and fondness come from, that sudden transformation?
It had come from money.
PART THREE
1
UNPOL is the acronym for United Nations Police, sometimes also called CIVPOL, or Civilian Police; and as the acronyms suggest, the UNPOLs occupied some nether ground between civilian employees of the Mission and military units like the Uruguayans. The UNPOLs came to work dressed in uniforms — the uniforms of their national police force — but unlike the soldiers, they were in Haiti by choice.
Any nation can contribute a police officer to a United Nations Peacekeeping unit: just how many police officers a nation will contribute and to which mission is part of the intense and often inscrutable politics of the UN in New York. There is a lot of arm-twisting involved, and nations heavily invested in the outcome of a mission, as the United States is heavily invested in the success of the Mission in Haiti, will put lots of behind-the-scenes pressure on nations like Senegal or Sri Lanka to muscle up some manpower. (At one point, Senegal had 150 policemen in Haiti. The United States, by way of comparison, had 45.) More or less, the deal between the United Nations and the contributing nations is this: the contributing nation will continue to pay an individual police officer’s salary back home, but the UN will pay his housing and travel, plus a per diem and bonus for hazardous duty.* The UN, however, is generous in its assessment of expenses, and for police officers from poor countries, the expense money will often outstrip by far their salaries back home. So with frugal living in Haiti, cops from Burkina Faso or Sri Lanka or the Philippines, living six to a room and eating nothing but Top Ramen from the PX, can save quite a boodle on Mission. Policemen from the States, on the other hand, are often reluctant to head off to Haiti, so the base salary offered by the State Department through its contractors is significant: this, plus the expense money and hazard pay, is what enticed Terry White to Haiti. Every contributing nation has its own method of selecting UNPOLs. Qualifications are, professionally speaking, minimaclass="underline" five years’ experience in law enforcement, basic physical fitness, a health exam, and working knowledge of one of the official languages, which in the case of the Mission in Haiti were French and English. UNPOLs from poorer nations tended to be at the end of their careers, assigned either as the capstone of long service or, rumor had it, as a result of bribery and corruption back home. Competition for a UN job could be quite intense. One of the ironies of the UN system is this: there are Haitian policemen serving all over the world as UNPOLs themselves, monitoring and mentoring law enforcement officials in places like Congo and Burundi, even as Congo and Burundi send their policemen to serve in Haiti.
* * *
When Terry White first came to Hades, he had an interview with the personnel office in Port-au-Prince. The guy who conducted the interview was a pygmy — no kidding! That’s the way Terry told it. From the contingent of Congo. He was perhaps five feet tall, with enormous glasses and a face as wrinkled as a walnut. He spoke very slowly, and whatever Terry said provoked a copious round of note taking. The interview lasted ten minutes.
“So what do you see yourself doing here?” the pygmy asked, his voice all high and reedy.
“Investigations and interrogations,” Terry said.
The pygmy scribbled out the first chapter of his memoirs. Then he looked up.
“Do you speak French?” he asked in French.