The chef nodded, as if he had absorbed an important lesson. Pleasure equals duty.
Then Beyala lectured on handcuffs and their proper use. The UNPOLs were supposed to give a little speech to the locals about some aspect of good policing. Somebody gave the UNPOLs the lesson in their Sunday meeting, then they spread the gospel all week long. This week it was handcuffs. Last week it was the role of the juge de paix. The week before that it was arrest warrants. The guy chewing his tongue on the stool zoned out. His eyes went glassy — no exaggeration, like he had a 103-degree fever. The chef nodded his head seriously.
“The handcuff, what is it?” Beyala began. “It is a tool for the control of the prisoner. When the prisoner is handcuffed, he is in your charge and entirely your responsibility. What are the three circumstances under which the handcuff is to be employed? Alors…”
Long silence sometime thereafter indicated to all present that Beyala was done.
They have mentored.
Now it was time to “support.”
Out came the prisoners. An old guy, a young guy, both handcuffed with the plastic flexi-cuffs the UN gave the PNH. (“The prisoner may be restrained only when the liberty of his or her hands might constitute a menace to the security of others…”) They looked docile enough, but the young one was accused of threatening to kill his uncle in a beef over a pig. The old one had gone and rooted around in some other guy’s field like a wild boar — he was charged with dévastation de champs. No one knew why; in Haiti, no one ever knew why. The old one looked guilty, like a dog with his head in the garbage.
The fat PNH stopped chewing on his tongue.
“Au revoir, Messieurs!” he said to the prisoners. “You are going to travel today like a pair of princes!”
When they finally got back to the commissariat, the PNH took the prisoners inside, where they passed out of Terry’s life forever.
They have supported.
* * *
During Terry’s first few months in Jérémie, a couple of other plum posts on the org chart came open. There was the coordinateur. Reporting and Planning. Mentoring Support. Admin, Logistic, and Personnel. The guys who did riot prevention. There were maybe three dozen cars in the whole Grand’Anse — and even Traffic would have been a step up. Guys who had less experience than he had, guys who didn’t even know how to turn on a computer, were getting those jobs. Traffic went to that little Indian guy, Sunderdarbashan, who was best friends with Marguerite Laurent; when Marguerite Laurent saw him, she wrapped her arm around him and said, “Go get ’em, buddy.” That kind of shit drove Terry crazy. He didn’t think that was how an office should be run, on the basis of whether Marguerite Laurent thinks you’re a cutie-pie.
After the Sunderdarbashan incident, Terry got into it with Marguerite Laurent.
“What is it going to take for me to get treated with some respect around here?” he said.
Terry could be a forceful guy, and the way he said it, in retrospect, was maybe a little heavy-handed, like he was trying to intimidate her.
She was right back in his face. “Terry, what you need to do here is relax.”
Terry was getting a little obsessive about things — he admitted it later, just that word. The house he was staying in out on the Route Nationale was like a hot concrete box at night. His Jordanian housemate spent all night watching bondage porn, and all night long Terry heard women begging and pleading, “Please, no, please.” Terry’s back would be killing him on his cheap cotton mattress, so he couldn’t sleep.
He felt like this wasn’t some isolated incident in his life: that for a good long time now, the Marguerite Laurents of this world had been looking down their long, pointy noses at him, obstructing and impeding him. The way it was supposed to have worked was like this: law enforcement for ten years, then elected office. That’s the way it worked in Watsonville County, either law enforcement or military. They told him, “First you carry a gun, then you run.” So he carried a gun and ran twice. First he took a shot at state senate, but he never got the kind of full-throttle support from the local big shots that he’d needed to win the primary, which was an injustice after the sheer donkey hours he’d put in over the years. He and Kay had been shaking the money tree for all and sundry for a decade now: cocktail parties, fund-raisers, you name it. Knocking on doors, doing favors. It didn’t matter. No gratitude. Then, after Sheriff Shook’s heart attack, he’d expected that the sheriff’s job would be his, until Tony Guillermez and company decided that the Republican Party needed more Hispanic faces. “I can campaign in a sombrero,” Terry said. Not even a chuckle out of Tony. So that was that.
Then even the job was gone, when the new sheriff, a Democrat, fired all the Republicans. His right to do so, Terry would have done the same. Deputy sheriff is a political appointee. Been that way since Hector was piddling the rug. Still a bitter pill to swallow, since no one could really argue with his results, his arrest records, the clearance rates. Heard from a friend of a friend that twice in the last five years he had been very nearly Southeastern Lawman of the Year. Putting Marianne fucking Miller in that job, what a crock. Then came all the money problems. What a man did was provide for his family, and for a long while there, ipso friggingo facto, Terry was hardly a man. Now with this new job in Haiti, at least they could pay the mortgage.
Truth be told, Terry hated Haiti. Later, he’d laugh about how much he hated it. At the time, not a whole lot of ha-ha-ha. Last place he ever wanted to be in his whole life was Haiti. The number of times Terry had fantasized about one day living in Haiti was precisely zip. Would leave tomorrow if he could, never come back. He didn’t like the people, who kept making fun of him; he didn’t like the food, which was spicy and greasy. Just didn’t see much point in the place. This was his first time in a third world country, not counting a week in a resort in Cancún, and he hadn’t liked that much either. Came as a surprise to him that everyone was so fucking broke. He’d seen poverty back home — what cop hasn’t? — but Haiti was something else. All his life Terry had dreamed of being rich, and now in Haiti he was rich and he didn’t like it. Children walking barefoot with five-gallon drums of water on their heads, kids with hair red at the roots. Babies with swollen bellies, just like on TV. Back home, poverty smelled like fat and grease, like buckets of french fries simmering in the sun. But Haiti was like old sweat, bad fruit, shit, and ammonia. Every day he’d drive back from some small Haitian town with a prisoner or two handcuffed in the backseat, the smell so strong he’d gag.
Everywhere Terry went, people asked him for money, not just kids, but adults too, even fat, sleek, healthy-looking adults, like sea lions barking for fish. How the hell can you be fat when kids are hungry? Damn country made no sense to Terry. It was like a reflex with them, he thought: they saw someone white and the hand came up. Blan, ba’m yon cadeau—White, give me a present. He’d say no and they’d start shouting at him. Or he’d give them his change and they’d ask for more. The worst part was that he couldn’t criticize, not really. These people just wanted to suck on the same teat he was sucking on. He just had the good fortune to get on it first.
Terry knew what was right and what was wrong. That’s why he had gotten into law enforcement. Back in the States, he’d locked up bad guys. Threw them in lockup because they were scumbags. Got them to tell their sad, mean stories. Didn’t hate them, didn’t love them, just didn’t want them on the same streets as the people he loved. He’d felt proud of his work: it was something he could explain to his nephews. His father had once told him, “Never do a job you can’t explain to a child.” So he told the boys: “I keep good people safe from bad people.”