The station quickly won loyal listeners by offering a daily diet of Compas music and soccer scores, but the choicest offering came at dusk, when Député Aurélienne, a little man in possession of an incongruously deep voice, sat in the recording booth, opened a bottle of rum, and discussed the faults of his archenemy, the Honorable Mayor Fanfan. This was a subject that could keep him going for hours. He informed his listeners of Mayor Fanfan’s corrupt and extravagant ways, his taste for young girls. All this naturally rankled Hizzoner, but what threw the mayor over the top was when the député mocked Mayor Fanfan’s considerable girth: Mayor Fanfan had a habit of traveling around town by two-stroke motorcycle, and the député commiserated with the burdens of that poor vehicle, calling it the “Mayor’s Camel” on account of the way the motorbike bobbed lazily up and down on the road as it hauled Mayor Fanfan over the rocks and dirt.
That was really going too far, and one day, with Député Aurélienne in Port-au-Prince attending to the people’s business, armed men broke down the door of the small radio station and, live and on the air, shot all four citizens found inside: the député’s brother-in-law, his nephew, a radio engineer from the capital who had come to adjust the antenna, and a young lady whose reasons for being inside the station were never made clear. The radio engineer from Port-au-Prince lost his leg, and the young lady lost her eye; the others died. The station at that moment changed both management and political orientation.
The investigation into the shooting was assigned to Johel Célestin.
There is no precise equivalent to the juge d’instruction in the Anglo-Saxon system of justice. In the Haitian system of justice, a distant descendant of the Napoleonic Code, the juge d’instruction acts as a kind of investigative magistrate, a cross between a detective, a prosecutor, and a judge. The juge d’instruction has the power to investigate all manner of serious crimes and to imprison suspects for months at a time while the investigation proceeds. His job is to prepare a dossier that will eventually be submitted to a public prosecutor, who will then, based on the juge d’instruction’s research, take the case to trial.
Johel pursued his investigation of the shootings in Les Irois with his customary discipline and hard work. He interviewed dozens of witnesses and took hours of depositions. Soon he had produced a preliminary dossier setting out his findings, a dossier whose conclusion went far beyond the details of the night in question.
Johel explained the facts of the dossier to Terry and the other UNPOLs. Haiti lies roughly midway between Colombia and the southeastern coast of the United States; to transport cocaine from Colombia directly to the United States is both risky and difficult. Far better to ship cocaine to southern Haiti, transport the drug overland to the northern shore, and send the freight on to the Cold Land in many smaller pieces: in cigarette boats and catamarans and slow tankers out of Port-de-Paix in the north; buried in the purses, bellies, and trick-bottom suitcases of nervous-looking Haitian or Dominican immigrants; or across the border, where more efficient Dominican dispatchers would dispatch it north in cruise ships, diplomatic pouches, and cargo holds.
On moonless nights, no place in Haiti was darker than Les Irois, where the nearest electric light was at least fifty miles away. Fishing boats would slip out onto the Caribbean, returning at dawn with bricks of cocaine wedged under their nets. The war in Les Irois then was a battle over who would harvest this lucrative catch.
Judge Célestin’s dossier proposed that the man who organized the cocaine trade in Les Irois was not the mayor, but rather his patron, Sénateur Maxim Bayard.
* * *
At first the judge had thought the shots were fireworks, like the kinds the kids set off at Carnival. Then the kitchen window exploded, and Nadia shrieked. Nadia’s cry made the judge realize that something was wrong, but still he had trouble understanding that somebody meant to do him harm. Nobody had ever wanted to harm him before. There were two different sounds: one was the sound of the shot and the other was a kind of echoing thwack as the bullet lodged in the hard cement of the house. The judge saw himself in the mirror: he was smiling, as if this all were some complicated practical joke. Nadia had already left the kitchen and was running down the corridor to the bedroom. The judge saw his own face settle into a scowl, and he followed her, patting his pocket for his phone.
* * *
Judge Célestin told the UNPOLs that there was nothing he could do to prosecute the Sénateur, who, like all members of the Haitian legislature, enjoyed the privilege of parliamentary immunity. The phrase “parliamentary immunity” rankled Terry: no one should be above the law. Still, the judge’s dossier had potentially broad ramifications. You can’t ignore a thing like that, not even in Haiti. In the worst case, it might cause the American embassy to invoke the Oxblood rule, which limited the dispersal of American money to foreign governments known to be involved in the trafficking of narcotics. The U.S. secretary of state was required to certify to Congress that this was not the case — how could she do that with a report like the judge’s on record? No one wanted to see that happen here. This was the kind of case that causes the embassy to start suspending visas.
The judge told the UNPOLs that he was looking to arrest the mayor, who still remained at large, and convince him to testify under oath against the Sénateur. Such testimony, the judge felt, might compel the sénat to lift its esteemed member’s immunity and allow him to be prosecuted.
Terry knew that the judge had long ago issued a mandat for the arrest of the mayor, but he also knew that no one had succeeding in getting Fanfan in the bracelets. The local PNH had been ordered to arrest him but, themselves frightened of the mayor and his henchmen, failed to produce him. Twice pickup trucks of armed PNH had been sent from Jérémie to arrest the mayor, but both times he had been tipped off to the operation and slipped into the hills, coming back down when the coast was clear. Rumor held that Sénateur Maxim Bayard was the mayor’s informant.
At the conclusion of Johel’s presentation, Terry invited the judge for a beer. His own run-in with the Sénateur in the parking lot of the Bon Temps had made him sympathetic to Johel’s work, and he was curious about this earnest young Haitian judge. More than once in the course of his investigation, Johel told Terry, he had received telephone calls in the middle of the night, only to hear the sounds of a funeral Mass played on the other end of the line. Then there had been an incident just a week before, when Johel came home to find the cadaver of a dog on his front steps. The judge’s courage moved Terry and made him feel a little ashamed: here was somebody doing what Terry came to Haiti to do. He gave the judge his card and told him to call, day or night, if there was anything he could do to help.
* * *
There were varying accounts of just what happened the night that Johel called Terry, and far and away the most modest was the account offered by Terry himself. The judge’s house was up in Calasse, where Johel, a few years back, had bought a plot of land. Terry drove up in the darkness, high beams shining and siren wailing, and the way he told it, the sound of the siren alone was sufficient to drive off the two men on a motorcycle who had been firing their pistols at the judge’s concrete house. By the time Terry arrived, he said, all he could see was the bouncing crimson of their receding taillight.