“A little,” Terry said in French. He’d had four years in high school.
The pygmy wrote out Chapter Two.
“Do you enjoy a challenge?” he asked—un défi.
“No,” Terry said, thinking that a défi was a defeat.
The pygmy went back to Chapter One and began to revise.
“Thank you,” the pygmy eventually said.
“My pleasure,” Terry said.
The pygmy sent Terry to Jérémie.
When he got to Jérémie, Terry had another interview, this time with the commandant of the UNPOLs, a tough nut of a Québécoise named Marguerite Laurent. You take a group of twenty-four men and women, and you’ll have your Morlocks and your Eloi: Marguerite Laurent took one look at Terry, at his beefy face and hands, those slow-moving eyes, and she figured Terry was Morlock. She asked him what he wanted to be doing, and when he said “Interrogations,” she assigned him to patrol.
Driving patrol was rough, boring work. In Haiti, UNPOLs dress in full police uniform, carry arms, and drive vehicles marked POLICE, but they don’t have executive authority. Executive authority is the power to make decisions, to effect change, to govern, to rule. In Haiti the government retained sovereignty, such as it was, and between the government of Haiti and the United Nations there was the complicated symbiosis of an unhappy marriage, both partners simultaneously powerless, frustrated, and trapped. At any given moment, the government could insist that that man get the hell right out of her house — and the United Nations would. This ain’t no colony: no man be tellin’ me what to do in my own state, bought and paid for with nothing but a lifetime of sweat and blood. But if the United Nations left, the government would collapse—and don’t be calling me, baby, when you got yourself a coup d’état or a revolution or an assassination. With you, lady, it’s always you don’t be needing me till you be needing me. I hope you enjoy exile, Mr. President. Live it up. I’ll just be laughing at your sorry ass. So Terry and his colleagues couldn’t arrest a suspect or even have him in their possession: if he started to walk away, they’d have no executive authority to haul him back to the vehicle. The Haitian national police, the PNH, on the other hand, had executive authority, but no transport, so pretty much all Terry and his colleagues did was haul Haitian cops around so they could exercise their executive authority.
Say you had a suspect sitting in the cell in the commissariat up in Beaumont. Say the guy’s been eating his neighbors’ goats for months. So one day his fed-up neighbors rope him up, beat his goat-nourished ass near to death, then lead him down to the juge de paix, who hears the case and remands this suspected goat rustler into the custody of the PNH, to be transported forthwith to the pénitencier in Jérémie, there to await trial on charges of goat thievery. But the two hundred or so PNH who police the 350,000 citizens of the Grand’Anse have a couple of motorcycles and a broken-down pickup truck — that’s all. So Terry and his colleagues spent most of their time driving members of the PNH from Jérémie out to one police station or another, then driving back with a goat thief or two in the rear. If all that sounds a lot like chauffeur service, that’s how it seemed to Terry too.
There was a story Terry had told me: “So one time these two police in Dame Marie call the commissariat in Jérémie. They need a lift ASAP to Chambellan to execute a warrant. So we drive to Dame Marie, get Tweedledum and his brother Numbnuts, drive them up to this village, where they tell us to wait in the car. Situation is under control. The blan might get people riled, and so me and this guy Beyala from Cameroon, we sit there by the car. This is normal. This is every day on Mission. In goes one guy and gets laid, comes out, doesn’t even bother to tuck his shirt in. Then in goes the other guy to bust his nut. Two and a half hours on the road to get there, two and a half to get back. Twenty minutes while these guys do their thing. I don’t think that’s a good use of anyone’s resources. They’re paying me one hundred K plus to be a taxi driver.”
“One hundred K plus?” I said.
“Salary, per diem, hazard pay, et cetera.”
“And that’s the job?”
“Mentoring, monitoring, and support. That’s support. You gotta believe, brother, I know something more about law enforcement than how to drive a four-by-four pimpmobile, but that’s what the job was.”
“That must have been frustrating for you,” I said.
“I was going out of my skull.”
“What did you expect you would be doing?”
“Making things better.”
But what bothered Terry more than anything was the offense to his pride: almost two decades in law enforcement, and he was the moron who sat in the car. The PNH had a unit doing nothing but investigations and interrogations, the Police Judiciaire, and Gilles, the French guy assigned to monitor, mentor, and support them was a motorcycle cop back in the old country. Terry had known motorcycle patrolmen back home, and French motorcycle cops — let’s just say about the same level of mental acuity as their American counterparts. On those long drives up into the mountains Terry had time to brood.
* * *
Every morning when the UNPOLs saw one another they shook hands. The office would start filling up at about half past seven, and each newcomer would seek out and shake the hands of those already arrived. Then the Africans felt it impolite to begin the day without asking after one another’s families and affairs at home — even though they had seen one another just the evening before. All the UNPOLs quickly adopted this custom, even when shaking non-African hands. They would look deeply into one another’s eyes, like women.
“I hope you slept well, monsieur.”
“Not badly at all. But the heat!”
“I trust your wife is well?”
“Very well, grâce à Dieu! I spoke with her just last night. And yours?”
“Ça va! Ça va!”
“And the affairs of your country?”
“There is talk of a coup. And yours?”
“Tranquille!”
All this produced considerable bonhomie and also demanded quite a bit of time: the first half hour of every workday was consumed with handshaking and salutations, and in the evening, equally elaborate farewells.
The only one who couldn’t stand that crapola was Terry. The others would be shaking hands and bouncing their heads and smiling and being as friendly as a guy trying to unload a used Buick, and Terry would be waiting out in the patrol car, keys in hand. Once, to this guy Beyala from Cameroon, he said, “Doesn’t anyone around here want to get something fucking done?”
“Du calme, Monsieur,” said Beyala. “Dans le chaleur, toujours du calme.”
First stop was always the commissariat, where a dozen PNH were lounging in the morning sun. The PNH were playing dominoes and getting their shoes shined. Every now and again the PNH would impound a stolen goat or a pig, and these animals were tethered out front, munching on the dying crabgrass. When the animals got big enough, the PNH would barbecue the evidence. There was a fire truck parked out front too, a gift from the people of Taiwan: whenever Taiwan needs to clinch a close vote in the General Assembly, the Taiwanese buy Haiti a shiny fire truck or a bulldozer. This really ticks off the other Chinese, who make a fuss and threaten to veto the Mission’s mandate in the Security Council. In the end, the diplomats squawk and gibber, and every year the mandate gets extended. In any case, the fire truck hadn’t much changed the quality of life in Jérémie: a few years back, one of the local political parties burned down the house of a member of a rival political party. The Taiwanese fire truck drove over to the scene of the crime, but the pump didn’t work — no water — and the local population turned on the firemen and beat them. The fire spread and destroyed most of the old wooden houses on the waterfront. Since then, the fire truck just stayed at the commissariat when there was a problem — not that it could have gone anywhere anyway, as the PNH had no gas.