“I prefer fresh shrimp to truth.”
“I’ll let the cook know that you weren’t happy,” the SRSG said.
“Be careful, or she’ll put poison in your morning coffee,” Johel said. “Our Haitian ladies can be temperamental.”
The SRSG allowed himself a smile, but now his face grew grave. The judge had all his life felt that the world of men was divided into two categories, the serious and the frivolous, and he had endeavored always to ally himself with the serious. Now he wondered in what camp the SRSG placed him.
“You might be an honest man also,” the SRSG said. “The essential thing for an honest man is to know it, and to adjust his behavior accordingly.”
Johel was silent. Through the windows, he could see a garden, and in the garden, a gardener clipped roses.
“This situation cannot continue,” the SRSG said.
The judge was startled to find the conversation come around so directly to essentials.
“My colleagues and I—”
“Your colleagues and you are running a foolish, grave risk. I invited you here today to tell you that you will lose. You must choose how you wish to lose. I say this as an honest man to another honest man.”
“We have an honest grievance.”
“Take your honest grievance to an honest judge, if you can find one, and win an honest verdict. Then enforce it. I didn’t say that you were in the wrong — I said that you were going to lose. And it’s a terrible shame if Haiti loses a man like you. I saw you on television yesterday, and I said to myself, ‘Here is a man who can help this country. So full of ideas. So mature.’”
“Some might say that the place for such a man is in government,” the judge said.
“Yes, if you could win an election, but they won’t even allow you on the ballot. They will never allow you on the ballot.”
“How can you be so sure of that?”
“My office is on the top floor of the Hotel Christopher. I have a view that extends to the sea — it might well be the broadest view in Port-au-Prince. Just from looking out the window, I can see whether there is smoke in Cité Soleil, if the airport is open, if the president’s limousine is parked at his mistress’s house, or if he has slept at home with the First Lady. And so I know before he knows himself if the president is in a good mood or a bad one.”
The SRSG leaned forward. “If I could, I’d make you president of Haiti tomorrow — I would. That’s how certain I am that your heart is in the right place. I think Haiti would be a better place for a man like you in power. But I don’t have that power.”
“I don’t want to be president,” said the judge.
“I know you better than you know yourself. You have a presidential heart.”
“I want to build a road.”
“And I thought you were an honest man.”
The judge watched the gardener take a towel from his pocket and rub the sweat off his face. “What do you want from me?” he asked.
“Peace. I want you to do what you have to do, and relinquish the CEH headquarters. I want you to tell your protesters to go home. I want schools to open and the ladies to sell their mangoes and spaghetti in the markets, and I want those children to stop throwing rocks.”
“And what will you do for me?”
The SRSG made his special noise. Buying rugs in Isfahan, he had found it an effective way to commence negotiations; it suggested that he was a connoisseur of rugs and well acquainted with their market values.
“We’ll let you come round to our side of the desk, see the world from on high. We’ll establish a commission of the best and the brightest on electoral reform, and we’ll need a chairman, someone honest. The chairman will find a place on the payroll of the Mission, and his report will be submitted to a grateful president, who will use all of his powers to see that its recommendations are implemented.”
“Will I be on the ballot?”
“That remains in the hands of the current, legally constituted authority.”
The judge understood the diplomatic subterfuge.
A waiter came into the room to clear the table. He was a dead ringer, Johel thought, for his Tonton Jean. Johel hadn’t seen Tonton Jean since his bachelor party. They said that in the last few years he didn’t recognize anyone, with the Alzheimer’s and all. But Tonton Jean in his day would have known just what advice to give his nephew: he’d had an instinctive, canny shrewdness when giving advice to others, at sharp odds with his notorious inability to manage his own affairs. Johel studied the waiter’s face as if Tonton Jean could incarnate himself in this stranger, returned to vigor across time and distance. The waiter’s blank-faced stare of practiced servility gave away nothing at all, but Johel knew that this man went home to his wife and children bursting with the opinions he had concealed throughout the day, then entranced the neighbors with brilliant mimicry of the powerful men who dined in the SRSG’s private dining room.
“Will you excuse me?” the judge asked the SRSG.
“To your left.”
The bathroom was just down the hall, the walls decorated with paintings of women in the market. A commission, the judge thought. Now that might be enough. Enough to let everyone stand down with honor. Enough to look himself in the mirror.
The judge opened his fly and pulled out the gavel. He knew (the SRSG hadn’t needed to mention it) that the money would be more than decent — and beyond this commission, there would be others. That’s the way the system worked. He felt an almost giddy sense of relief. The SRSG had been right, he reckoned: he was an honest man, and truth be told, he had wanted a way out. He’d gotten himself in too deep — who knows how these things happen? Blessed be the Peacemakers, for theirs is the Kingdom—
In the otherwise immaculate toilet of the SRSG’s guest bathroom there was an immense turd, eight inches of muscular excrement, tan in color, formed like a submarine, a perfect specimen.
The judge, fastidious about all things fecal, flushed the toilet. The turd rolled slightly to one side and settled back into place, a sturdy bark in unruly waters. The judge pissed into the toilet (he could hold back no longer) and flushed again; and again the turd, fine craft that she was, rode out the water’s blast.
This, the judge reckoned, was the kind of turd that required breaking up. He looked for a toilet brush. There was none. Would the household staff have dared to crap in the SRSG’s guest toilet? Unlikely, but surely the SRSG himself had a private toilet in which to do his business. In any case, this turd was almost as large as the SRSG himself.
The judge tried flushing the toilet a third time. The turd began to move along the toilet’s floor, like a jellyfish drifting, and then disappeared from view. The judge reinserted his manhood in his pants — and the turd came swimming back into the bowl.
And the judge knew: no matter who had produced this turd, it was now his. There was no flushing away this fact: this turd was on him. No matter who was its author, he would be blamed for this turd. And tonight at the waiter’s house, the neighbors would laugh as the waiter who looked like Tonton Jean told how the judge had eaten the SRSG’s rich food, been made a fool of by the silver-tongued blan, and left behind the turd of the century for the servants to clean up.
The judge knew that only by defiance could he escape the SRSG’s trap. Only by walking out now — head high, proud, independent, free — could he escape that turd’s shame.
6
The next morning, very early, first sun slanting across the hotel room floor, Nadia curls naked in the judge’s arms. The judge breathes in her smell. He feels her tongue, quick and agile, graze along his lip. She is weightless, like a bird. Her shallow breath. His thick hands on her smooth skin. She sighs. He slips inside her and the room is filled with yellow sunlight, so strong the judge shuts his eyes.