That evening, Toto Dorsemilus was in the custody of the PNH. Terry was there when they picked him up.
The next morning, Terry’s colleague, the young Canadian UNPOL who worked regularly with the sex-crimes unit of the PNH, took him aside and told him a number of disturbing details. The PNH records are poorly maintained, but she had learned from one of her counterparts in the sex-crimes unit that Toto Dorsemilus had been arrested twice before for the same crime under almost identical circumstances. Both times he had been released shortly after his arrest.
Terry passed a number of rough nights thinking of Toto, hearing the scared women cry on the Jordanian’s computer. When the PNH arrested him, Toto, chewing on that old toothbrush, had looked Terry straight in the eye, fearless and arrogant. Terry was convinced that Toto Dorsemilus would soon be out on the streets again, and just a week later he was. Terry saw him on his motorcycle, riding down the Grand Rue. When he saw Terry, he slowed his bike down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Blan.”
It wasn’t hard to find out what happened: Mirabelle had bought herself a television set with some of the money the Sénateur had given her and Beatrice, two thousand dollars in all. In exchange, they had agreed to drop the charges. Then the Sénateur had pressured the public prosecutor to release Toto Dorsemilus without further investigation.
“Christ, Mirabelle, what do you need a television for? There’s no electricity,” Terry said.
“Gen toujou lespwa,” Mirabelle said. A Creole proverb: There’s always hope.
“And the next girl? How much is she worth?”
“I only have one daughter,” Mirabelle said.
“That’s a shame. If you had a couple of them, you’d be rich.”
3
Terry had been in Haiti four months or so when Kay decided to come down and visit for the first time. She was celebrating her fortieth birthday. She flew down to Haiti with a stomach full of butterflies, and not only because her sisters told her she was crazy to go on vacation in Haiti: “Wake up and smell the State Department travel advisories,” they said. But Kay knew that Terry wouldn’t invite her if she wasn’t going to be safe. No, it was seeing Terry that scared her. He’d been on Mission a couple of months — it was the longest spell they’d been apart since they were married — and for no reason she could explain, even to herself, the prospect of seeing him made her anxious, as if she were going on a blind date. She was worried that he was going to be a weirdo, or boring, or that she was going to hate him.
Just as soon as she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport in Jérémie, she knew things were going to be okay. He hadn’t shaved in a week or so, which was how she liked him best; and he must have dropped ten pounds, making his cheeks lean and angular. His skin was bronzed, and the smile he flashed her when she got off the plane made her know he was excited to see her.
“Well hello, stranger,” she said, sliding into his arms. “Know where a girl can find a man around here?”
That evening she sat with Terry drinking beer and eating barbecued chicken on the roof of his rented house. Both of his housemates were on vacation. Then Terry told Kay the whole Mirabelle and Beatrice saga.
“And you fired her?” Kay asked.
“Don’t you think it’s wrong, what she did?”
“Maybe that money could change her whole life. You don’t know. Maybe she could pay for school. Maybe she could—”
“If it’s wrong to buy justice, it’s wrong to sell it,” Terry said. “That’s not why I’m here.”
Kay wasn’t sure that Terry was right. But she took it as a sign of his sincerity — and his love for her — that he’d spent two days getting the house clean on his own. He’d even washed the sheets by hand.
The house was dark and charmless, with barred windows and low ceilings, but if you climbed up on the roof, there was a view of the Caribbean, which in the slanting light of sunset was a vast reflecting pool of ochre, crimson, and gold.
“This isn’t the way I imagined it at all,” she said.
“How did you imagine it?” said Terry.
“Remember Black Hawk Down?”
The next day, Terry took Kay to the beach. “You’re going to love it. It’s the best thing about this place,” he said. He’d been swimming every day after patrol for a couple of weeks now, and the regular exercise was starting to loosen up his back.
About halfway between the Uruguayan military base and the airport, the beach was just longer than a football field, covered in all the debris and muck the people of Jérémie threw in the ocean and allowed to drift ashore: plastic bottles and tin cans, old shoes, plastic bags, the occasional rubbery remnant of some late night faire l’amour. The garbage skeeved Kay, but past the dirty shore, the water was as beautiful and limpid and as green as one could possibly imagine in a tropical beach, the temperature of a lukewarm bathtub, fringed by high, tumbling cliffs.
There was some kind of sunken ship or submarine about ten minutes’ swim from the shore — just a turret perched a couple of feet above the low tide. Terry told Kay a story about that submarine. He said that in the war a German pocket U-boat ran aground there, manned only by a crew of three. The Germans came ashore, took one look at this lush land of brown rivers, gentle breezes, and pliant women, and decided to make for themselves a separate peace. The story seemed improbable to Kay — but she later found out that the town doctor was a guy named Schmidt. On his wall was a black-and-white photo of three white men, arm in arm.
Kay swam and then sat on the turret of the submarine, splashing her feet and looking at Terry. She had always loved to watch him exercise. He cut across the bay with an efficient, muscular crawl, his elbow coming up sharply to his ear, full extension through the elbow and wrist, reaching with his fingertips, breathing only every third stroke, covering distance swiftly and effortlessly. While Terry swam, Kay daydreamed about the house she’d put up on the big bluffs overlooking the sea. If she could do it all over again, she often thought, she’d have developed property. That’s where her real passion lay, in making beautiful things. She couldn’t believe such a spectacular spot was undeveloped, just ten minutes from the town center, ten minutes from the airport, and two minutes from a white-sand Caribbean beach. Maybe, she thought, Spanish Colonial, with a red tile roof and thick white walls, the house cleverly designed so every room had sea breezes and a view over the open water. She thought of white curtains flapping crisply, and white cotton sheets …
Terry and Kay fell into a rhythm that week, their happiest in years. During the days he worked, leaving the house while she was still in bed. Kay read through the morning or did yoga, following videos on her laptop. She sunbathed a little. Then she walked down the white chalk airport road, past Mission HQ, and all the way up the big hill to the Bon Temps, where she had lunch. It was a very strange feeling for Kay to be the only white woman on the streets. As a teenager, she had been friends with one of the few black kids at her school, a pretty girl named Nina. Nina had told Kay that it was exhausting just being different all day, even if most people were nice. Now Kay thought about looking Nina up on Facebook and letting her know that two decades later, she finally understood. In the afternoon she took a motorcycle taxi back to the house: she hadn’t been on a motorcycle in decades, and these rides, weaving around donkeys and bumping over rocks and potholes, felt as forbidden and thrilling as when she was a teenager riding home on her high school boyfriend’s Yamaha. When Terry came home, he would take her swimming, and they would make dinner together, cobbling together whatever ingredients she found in the market.