When Kay heard this story, she thought it sounded heroic in and of itself. But the judge, when she finally met him a few months later, told her that there was not one motorcycle, but two, four armed men in total. And they weren’t firing pistols, he said, but assault rifles. When Terry’s headlights hit them, they turned from firing at the judge’s house to firing in the direction of his oncoming vehicle — and still he kept coming. Only the fact that they were lousy shots prevented them from shooting Terry or his vehicle. Then they fled on their bikes.
Whatever the precise details, it was a fact that when Terry finally came back from the judge’s house late that night, he was shaking with adrenaline. Kay poured him a healthy glass of rum and took one for herself. Then she gave him a long massage, concentrating first on his shoulders and aching back, then kissing all the places where the muscles were knotted and hard. “My hero,” she said. Other women might have been frightened by Terry’s story, but Kay was exhilarated. That night he made love to her with a ferocious intensity, as if the two of them were breaking rules.
The two stayed up most of the night talking. They talked about Haiti, about all the strange twists of fate and odd coincidences, the setbacks and victories that had brought them to this place at this moment: they were in a town neither of them, six months before, had ever heard of, in a country they had barely known existed.
“Maybe you were here just to answer that phone call tonight,” Kay said.
“Maybe,” Terry said. “But can I tell you something? And you won’t laugh or—”
Kay replied by kissing Terry. He could feel the softness of her breasts on his chest.
“I got here — and you know, I wasn’t good here. But ever since I got here, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m meant to be here. That this is it.”
They were silent for a moment. Somebody observing them might have seen nothing but a couple lying quietly and supposed that they were drifting off to sleep. But Terry was telling Kay, no words necessary, that something important had been missing and he thought he had found it. It was something even more important than happiness: it was something you would give your happiness to obtain. And Kay was telling Terry that this time, finally, they weren’t going to waste their opportunity, that she would be with him every step of the way, wherever this new road might lead.
Finally Kay said, speaking out loud, “Have you felt that way before?”
“Only once,” he said. “When I met you.”
Kay didn’t know if Terry was telling the truth, but even if he wasn’t, she liked that he loved her enough to lie.
* * *
The morning after the attack, Johel Célestin came to Mission HQ, where he asked Marguerite Laurent, the head of the UNPOL program, what the Mission could do to protect him. The judge made it clear that should the Mission be unable to guarantee his security, his inquiries regarding Les Irois would end.
The situation in Les Irois was now a matter of national interest. The radio engineer from Port-au-Prince who lost a leg had filed a complaint with Amnesty International, and soon thereafter Le Nouvelliste, the newspaper in Port-au-Prince, ran an article on the rogue mayor of Les Irois. At Port-au-Prince cocktail parties foreign donors mentioned the case to their Haitian counterparts; terms like “judicial impunity” were bandied about in high circles. The American ambassador mentioned the situation in Les Irois to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General in their weekly meeting; the SRSG considered the situation an embarrassment and a hindrance to his own personal project of one day becoming a Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, and he directed his subordinates to take all necessary measures to bring the situation to an expeditious conclusion.
For all of these reasons, Marguerite Laurent knew that it was important to assist the judge in any way she could. Because the Mission had no executive power in Haiti, and because the Mission’s mandate extended only to monitoring and mentoring, she could not directly assign UNPOLs as bodyguards, but she soon spoke with the directeur départemental of the PNH, who reluctantly agreed to create a four-man VIP protection unit, with the Mission offering monitoring, mentoring, and support. Then she agreed to Johel’s other request, and she assigned Terry to lead the squad.
4
The organizational chart of a large bureaucratic entity is like some baroque habitation, a Sicilian palazzo, say, in which might exist for decades forgotten and unexamined rooms, suites of rooms, and even wings, a film of dust coating equally the ormolu dresser, a bloodstain on the marble floor, and the skeleton of a cat. Once a box exists on an org chart — in this case the box read “Close Personal Protection”—the box will exist forever: no one will question the box’s right to exist. With Terry White now assigned to the box, it was understood by all that it was his to occupy indefinitely. No one thought to question him overmuch on his activities, provided that he supply a weekly précis to be included in the situation report. As long as no one complained — and for a very long time no one did — he was allowed to continue occupying the box.
So Johel and Terry got to spending a lot of time together. Terry was officially charged with monitoring, mentoring, and supporting a four-man crew of PNH in the art of close personal protection. The first few weeks on the job went like this: the judge traveled everywhere with two PNH and Terry; two other PNH guarded the judge’s house during the night. Terry instructed these men as best he could, bearing in mind that he himself had almost no experience in the bodyguard’s art other than what he found on the Internet. He encouraged in the PNH alertness, attentiveness to threats, and an imposing manner. Because he considered the judge’s life at risk, Terry committed himself to remaining in his presence as many hours of the day as he could. Here was a job — because he liked the judge, because it was useful, and because he was bored — that he was determined to do well.
Terry’s commitment to the judge’s welfare, however, was not matched by an equivalent zeal on the part of his trainees. The directeur départemental of the PNH was an ally of the Sénateur’s and had agreed to create this squad of bodyguards only reluctantly. As the drama of the attempted assassination faded, one by one the directeur départemental reassigned the trainees to other duties. In a matter of weeks, Terry found himself traveling the Grand’Anse with the judge alone. No one noticed that Terry was now in charge of the monitoring, mentoring, and support of a squad that no longer existed, except on paper.
Terry and the judge soon were friends. The men shared the kind of easy chemistry that allows a couple of fellows to spend upward of eight hours a day in a car together, navigating the back roads of the Grand’Anse.
The judge, for his part, didn’t want to be out of Terry’s sight. There had been a minute or seven when the bullets were coming through the house when he knew that he was going to die. Death came into the bedroom as a great white shadow, and Johel felt the ti bon ange, his good little angel, separate from his grosser body, filleted out of matter as neatly as a butcher takes fat off meat. Then his big body heard the siren of Terry’s car, and tentatively, like a frightened cat, the ti bon ange returned home. But Johel’s soul was skittish. As the days passed, that feeling of fragile equipoise between this home and the next stayed just as strong as the minute the first bullet broke the window and the adrenaline started coursing in his veins. It made him edgy and nervous and a little nauseated, and he stopped sleeping at night. It wasn’t the rational part of his brain, but something reptilian and concerned with survival that felt better if Terry was within eyesight. So at the end of the day he made a point of inviting Terry in for drinks, and on weekends invented excuses to get him over.