As it happened, Johel’s house had been shot up just days before the World Series was scheduled to commence. Both men loved watching sports, and so they decided to go fifty-fifty on a new satellite dish to replace the old one, which the bullets had reduced to little more than an oversize colander. In this way, long days on the road visiting remote Haitian villages soon metastasized into lazy evenings at Johel’s concrete house, the generator cranked outside to keep the beer cold and the TV rolling.
When Terry told Kay about the judge, she said, “He’s got a little man-crush on you.”
Terry said, “You think?”
But Terry soon came to admire Johel too, not only for the Ivy League diplomas on the wall, but for the gentle, respectful way he spoke with everyone he met. When Terry took the judge down to the Tribunal in the morning, outside the judge’s office there was always a line of Haitian peasants, two dozen long. Terry sat sometimes and talked to the peasants, and what was most notable was the stories he didn’t hear: I was slapped in jail by the judge, kept there two weeks until my lady visited him. Price of freedom was a night with my woman and a thousand dollars. Nobody told Terry that the judge was shaking him down, wanting a stack of bills just to give Nobody a court case that would end up with Nobody humiliated and embarrassed by a pair of fancy French-speaking avocats from town, everyone laughing at Nobody, until finally the judge, upon due and proper consideration, decided that Monsieur Nobody here owed everyone his balls. That wasn’t how it was with Juge Blan. The peasants told Terry that this judge was decent. He listened. He was smart. In his courtroom or office, it was just you and the neg you’re arguing with — he planted crops on my land; he ate my goat, which wandered onto his property — the judge asking questions, rubbing his big fat chin, then saying, “This is the law.”
Terry didn’t know how to say it precisely, but he had been looking for someone like the judge for a long time.
Soon the two men were talking work. Terry had a lot of hours to watch the judge on the job, and he had advice to offer him. The judge was a fine jurist, but his training was in corporate law. The role of juge d’instruction, however, required the skills of both lawyer and lawman. The juge d’instruction was a judge, but also a detective and interrogator, someone capable of forming a dossier sufficiently complete to submit to a prosecutor. This was very similar to the work Terry had done for decades. So Terry offered the judge advice on how to pursue his investigative responsibilities: how to interrogate a suspect, how to coax a confession, and how to use that confession to convince others to confess.
The judge, for his part, offered Terry an education on the realities of rural Haiti. This place wasn’t just poor like it’s just hot, he told Terry. It was made poor. There were forces and people that made these people poor, and it wasn’t just an accident. Terry was a history buff: on his bedside table there was generally a presidential biography or a volume of popular military history. So the judge’s impromptu lectures fell on congenial ears. The judge explained to Terry that Haiti had been founded as a revolution of slaves, but the revolution hadn’t ever really ended, even now, two hundred years after the last slave owner’s throat was slit. The country was divided to this day between a very small, very wealthy pale-skinned French-speaking population — the descendants of slave owners or their mulatto offspring — and the vast population of descendants of slaves, most of them living in the country, most of them poor, Creole-speaking, and black. Power in the country tended to flip back and forth between one group and the other, politicians using national office chiefly as a means to enrich themselves and devastate their enemies.
“You mean people like Maxim Bayard?” asked Terry.
* * *
Working with trainees back home, Terry had always said, “Give ’em a KISS: Keep It Simple for the Stupid.” It was a point of pride over the years, the paucity of broken doors in his territory. As deputy sheriff, he had for years tracked down deadbeat dads just by mailing to their last known address a postcard informing them that they had won a new set of tires from a local dealership. Gentlemen presented themselves as regular as sunshine, no muss and no fuss, no overestimating the folly of Watsonville County’s criminal class. Some guys showed up twice for those tires. Then there had been the time some mastermind was hoisting power tools from garages and Terry had put an ad in the local paper, offering to buy power tools. He could tell such stories from tomorrow until the resurrection. Terry’s fundamental insight now was that they needed Mayor Fanfan to come to them.
Soon there came a day when the judge and Terry were in the judge’s office, the diplomas hanging on the wall, talking over the scandal du jour, the story of the député from Jérémie. Story starts with the European Union purchasing for the Haitian Parliament a fleet of brand new SUVs, on the reasonable grounds that parliamentarians needed some way to travel from their district to the capital. Along with the outright gift of the vehicles had been allocated a budget for maintenance of the fleet. Johel tells Terry that the député’s tires were rolling out new every week from the parliamentary garage and coming home shredded.
“And that would be on account of…”
“… Monsieur le Député taking the tires off his car and selling them,” said Johel.
“Naturally.”
“So the député has those bad boys on and off who knows how many times, when another député from up north confronts him on the floor of the Chambre des Députés. He’s waving receipts at him like they’re winning lottery tickets.”
The judge tells Terry that the député from Jérémie responded as any man whose dignity has been outraged should: he took his pistol out from under his suit coat and took a shot at his accuser, right there on the spot. He was standing, the judge indicated, about two meters away. Nevertheless, he missed, plugging a clerk of the chambre in the shoulder.
An investigation conducted by the leading members of the chambre ensued. These men were of the same political party as the député. They concluded that the shooting was accidental.
“What kind of country are you people running here, brother?” Terry asked.
The judge put on a four-hundred-dollar-per-hour face. “I’m quite sure that the député had no intention of shooting the legislative clerk in the shoulder.”
The conversation might have continued on considerably longer had Mayor Fanfan not telephoned. “Reach out to the man, you never know,” Terry had said. “Make him think you want to be his friend.” So the judge had sent Mayor Fanfan a Facebook friend request. Soon the judge and the mayor were talking most every day, trading text messages, laughing at each other’s bons mots, the judge clicking “Like” in response to Mayor Fanfan’s daily prayer.
And what you have to appreciate is that Haiti is a nation tête en bas, all upside down. What would have been strange in Haiti — not unheard-of, just a little off — would have been if a man in the judge’s position was not interested in doing a little commerce with a man like Mayor Fanfan. Terry understood that Haiti, end of the day, is all one big family: any two Haitians can talk things over, come to an arrangement. What’s that they say? All veins are made for blood. Friend and enemy were labile categories in Haiti. Friend & Enemy, Good & Evil, Alive & Dead: all like the thick, tangled vines that make up the mapou tree, can’t take one without the other. One day the judge wants to arrest you, says nasty things about you; the next day, he’s your friend. That’s no craziness. What wouldn’t have made sense is the judge just sitting there in Jérémie, brooding over that dossier like a fat hen.