Terry and Beyala wait half an hour, until one of the PNH gets himself ready to head up to the mountains. Then they’re off.
The roads in the Grand’Anse are terrible. There were a few that were paved, but all in all, probably no more than two or three kilometers, max. Otherwise, every road was half big rock, half dirt. You couldn’t even hope to go on these roads if you didn’t have a healthy four-by-four. There were huge divots, holes big enough to swallow a rhinoceros, and places where the road was simply washed away and you just had to make your way along the side of a mountain as best you could. Terry and the other UNPOLs had a good car — a solid Nissan Patrol, painted white, letters U N on the side — but Terry’s back after about a week began to hurt something fierce. He felt every divot and pothole like an electric shock somewhere around his sacrum, a rivulet of pain running over his ass and down the back of his leg. He was starting and ending his days with 800 mg of ibuprofen. He’d get on the phone with Kay back home, and she’d know just from the way he was breathing that his sciatica was killing him.
All along the road, every couple hundred meters, there were big hand-painted signs explaining in French that this was the site of some international development project. A project outside Gommier to help farmers affected by hurricanes, paid for by the government of Japan and executed by the World Food Program. A pilot project to protect the banks of the Roseaux River, paid for by the European Union. The construction of a national school in Chardonette, paid for by the European Union. UNESCO was rebuilding the Adventist college Toussaint Louverture. In a large open field, the Inter-American Development Bank was proposing to build sixty latrines. The project had been scheduled to begin a few years back and would last four months, but the field was still barren and rocky when Terry drove by. USAID began a hillside agricultural program: nowadays the hill was nothing but rocks and stones. The IADB was rehabilitating the water supply of Carrefour Charles. There was a program to encourage the production of yams, paid for by the United Nations Development Program. A faded sign, almost falling down: CARE was putting in place a program designed to guarantee food security.
Two hours of bad road later, Terry White, Beyala, and a PNH were in Beaumont. Beaumont was like the set of some spaghetti western set in a tropical country populated only by dirt-broke black people. A single street, wooden houses, some drinking establishments, folks splay-legged in front of their houses, chewing idly on toothpicks, the ladies in kerchiefs, the gentlemen in big straw hats, tethered donkeys raw to the withers standing there under the burden of an overstuffed saddlebag or a few bags of charcoal, nobody moving, the day hot. Flies buzzing, and every eye is on you.
Terry parked out in front of the local police station, where the chef was a little guy with glasses covered in a film of dust and the apologetic air of a disorderly professor, as if he had expected the blan tomorrow or the day after that, or was it yesterday.
The chef rose with a start when they came in; then, gathering his wits about him, he extended a long, strong hand. The other PNH was unshaved, fat, chewing on his own tongue as if it were a piece of gum. Now he was sitting on a three-legged stool, trying to balance with only moderate success on just two legs while Terry inspected the register.
The names of the suspects and their crimes were written in beautiful cursive, like the names on the Declaration of Independence. The PNH are supposed to write down everybody they arrest and everybody they let go. You subtract the latter from the former, and the remainder should be rotting away in the dank, dark cell. It’s not tricky, Terry figured. It really wasn’t. He looked at the register, and he looked at it twice.
“Where is Neolién Joassaint?” he said.
They booked him in two weeks ago, still haven’t let him go, still haven’t charged him with a crime, still haven’t transported him to the prison in Jérémie. But he wasn’t in the cell either — Terry looked. In theory, that’s extrajudicial detainment.
“Neolién Joassaint?”
“Here,” Terry said. “Look. He’s on your books.”
The chef looked at the other guy. The other guy looked at the chef.
“The juge de paix ordered him released,” the chef finally decided.
Now, this is a pretty darned important detail. You take a prisoner into your custody, you should write down when you let him out. If you don’t do that, he takes off for the hills, how do you know the PNH didn’t bury him out back of the station? What they were trying to build in Haiti was a system of justice, effective bureaucratic procedures with checks and balances, allowing the police, on the one hand, to maintain public order and safety, but allowing the public, on the other hand, to audit the work of the PNH. Neither dictatorship nor anarchy.
“Did he sign the thing for his liberation?” Terry not remembering the word for “receipt.”
“Of course!”
“Can you show it to me?”
The chef let out an exasperated sigh. He pulled the whole drawer out of his desk, overturned a massive pile of papers on the floor, papers going back decades, little red bugs scurrying from the light. He started looking through the papers one by one, squinting at each.
Terry went out for a smoke with Beyala while he looked.
“It is not like this in my country,” Beyala said.
“Bullshit,” Terry said.
Terry had been on patrol with police from a dozen countries, and everybody said their country was better than Haiti. If you listened to the Africans, you’d think Cameroon, Tanzania, Niger, and Benin were little Switzerlands, they were so efficient; the people were so honest; the ladies so fat and lovely. Sri Lanka was swell. No place beat Nepal. The Philippines were fantastic. Only Haiti sucked.
Twenty minutes later the chef still couldn’t find the receipt. No one had a clue whether the PNH beat the guy to death and buried him, or whether he escaped and they were too embarrassed to mention it, or whether he was released legitimately.
Terry wrote all this down in his notebook. That’s all he was expected to do: take notes. That’s all he had the power to do.
Thus he had monitored.
Next came “mentoring.”
That’s when Beyala suggested that they buy some envelopes, organize the receipts by month. The chef put his lips together, then inhaled through his nose. He shook his head sadly.
“Unfortunately, we do not have the means to acquire office supplies,” he said.
The words “office supplies” sounded soft and effete in his mouth.
“Haiti is a very poor country,” he added.
The way Terry saw it, poverty was like a fast-running river sweeping every Haitian and his responsibilities downstream. The poverty of the nation excused every personal fault. C’est pas faute mwem, the Haitians said: It’s not my fault.
Beyala looked stern. “In my country, if we have no money to buy envelopes, we use our personal funds,” he said. “We care about our job. For us, it is a pleasure to do one’s duty.”