The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Read online

  The answer was yes, within a certain twisted context of circumstance and impulse. If you had to be in Haiti, the resort was as good as any place to reinvigorate yourself. A qualified yes, if you were the sort of naive, half-cracked traveler drawn to the edge of the abyss, someone whose rum sours were that much more quenching when consumed at the panoramic center of extreme malice and human suffering. Not to be self-righteous about the attraction; Harrington had always found the sours at Moulin Sur Mer to be memorably tart and bracing when he straggled in off the road like a legionnaire from the desert. And yes, he had even taken his wife there on her brief and unpleasant visit to the island.

  What else? Tom asked. What are you looking for?

  I have a client, Dolan began, and out came the story.

  For the third or fourth time in a year, an American couple, husband and wife, were on holidays in Haiti, booked into the Moulin Sur Mer. That can’t be right, Tom thought. Undoubtedly the man had business in Haiti and for some reason kept inviting his wife along, or she refused to be left behind. Perhaps she was an art collector, or perhaps a nurse, someone with a skill to share, an altruistic streak.

  The couple checked out of the resort late on a Saturday afternoon, Dolan continued, put their luggage in the sports utility vehicle they had rented for the week, and began the hour-and-a-half drive to the airport in the capital to board a return flight to Miami and on to Tampa, where they lived. At some point along the road south of the hotel—Conrad Dolan was imprecise about the location although he named the second quarry as a landmark—the man slowed the vehicle to a crawl to maneuver through a series of potholes. By now the sun had set, and although it was dark, very dark, and the road seemed empty, without headlights in either direction, the couple was overtaken from behind by two men on a motorbike who, after blurring past the SUV, swung sharply in front of it, stopped in a blocking position, and hopped off. The husband attempted to steer around them but the shoulder seemed to drop away and somehow he had trouble with the manual transmission and stalled the vehicle. What happened next was unclear, except for the results.

  The men had guns. Dolan’s client was pulled from the driver’s seat and pistol-whipped, and although he never lost consciousness he had the sense knocked out of him and scrambled away into the darkness on the opposite side of the road, finally crashing into a boulder and slipping down to hide, bleeding profusely from a wound in his forehead. A gun had been fired several times, he assumed at him, to prevent his escape. When he regained his senses and came out from behind the rock, the SUV and the motorcycle were gone, and at first he couldn’t find his wife but then he stepped on her where she lay on the shoulder of the road, faceup, shot to death.

  Disoriented, the man stumbled around until finally a car came up the road from the direction of Port-au-Prince and he flagged it down. As luck would have it, the driver turned out to be a staffer from the American embassy who used his cell phone to dial the local emergency number and the response was unexpectedly quick; before long a pickup truck carrying uniformed officers from the police station in Saint-Marc arrived on the scene. The police spent a few minutes glancing around with flashlights, asked the man some basic questions using the embassy staffer as translator, and then put the body in the bed of the pickup truck and drove off, telling him to wait there because someone else was coming to ask more questions. Some time later, another car arrived from the direction of Port-au-Prince, driven by a detective from the National Police Headquarters.

  Conrad Dolan paused in his narrative and Tom took advantage of the moment to ask him the obvious question: Why was this unfortunate man, clearly the victim of assault and robbery, his client?

  I’m closing in on that, said Dolan. Assault, yes. Robbery, no. Would you say, he asked, that such incidents are commonplace in Haiti?

  Aid workers, missionaries, the rare tourist—the ambushes weren’t everyday occurrences by any means, but they happened. The roads were dangerous. You stayed alert, practiced prudence, of course, and hoped you were lucky.

  Okay, said Dolan, and continued. The detective from Port-au-Prince was fairly vexed that the body had been spirited away to the Saint-Marc station before he could survey the crime scene, an examination he performed hastily because there was nothing left to see other than a blot of jellied blood in the dirt by the side of the road.

  Although the detective only spoke Kreyol, the embassy staffer, who was headed north with his wife to spend their Sunday on the beach at Moulin Sur Mer, expressed his sympathy to the client, gave him his card, and left. The husband’s skull was pounding, he felt numb, dazed, and when the detective opened the passenger door for him he climbed in and slumped into the seat, never saying a word during the ride south to Port-au-Prince, never hearing a word he could understand. The detective took him to a police station near the airport, sat him down at a table in a room, and left him there alone. A while later another detective came in, a guy who had lived in Brooklyn and spoke English. He gave the husband a wet rag to wipe his face, water to drink, and talked to him for about ten minutes—standard procedure, predictable questions—but the man was distraught, his head was not clear, and his answers were not helpful. The detective asked if he wanted to see a physician. The man said no. Okay, the detective said, I’m sending you to the Hotel Montana for the night but I want you to return in the morning to make a full report.

  The manager of the hotel and her staff were shocked by the man’s condition and saddened to learn the fate of his wife, and they treated him with exceptional kindness, summoning a doctor to stitch up the gash above his right eye, finding him clean clothes and toiletries for the night, sending a meal to his room. In the morning the manager called the room to say that a car was waiting for him downstairs to take him back to the police station and that she had asked the hotel’s accountant to accompany him, to serve as his interpreter.

  At the police station, he was met by the same detective who’d driven him back to the city the night before and was informed that his rental car had been found abandoned on the edge of Tintayen and impounded in a lot behind the building. He was also told that he and his wife’s possessions—their luggage, jewelry, laptop computer, cell phone, camera—had also been recovered from the car but could not be released back to him until he had signed the statement he had made the previous night in the station. The client said he couldn’t remember what he had said last night but okay, give it to him to sign, but the detective said no, not yet possible, it was still being translated from English into Kreyol and French.

  In the meantime the detective asked that he come along to the impoundment lot, where he was shown the SUV and told to get back in the car and drive it to the crime scene for a reenactment of the event. The SUV had a bullet hole through the passenger’s window, its seats were splashed with blood, and the client refused, offering to drive any other car than this one, stinking with the smell of his wife’s death, back north on Route Nationale One. They returned to the station and the accountant, who had been translating the conversation, was told by the detective to leave.

  The man was taken to the same room as the night before and told to wait. Hours passed until, eventually, the detective returned, sat down across from him, and pushed a document and a ball-point pen across the table. The handwritten statement was seventeen pages long but the client didn’t have a clue what it said because it was not in English, so naturally he wasn’t going to put his name on it. The detective, out of patience, got up and left the room. Moments later the door banged open, a pair of cops came in, grabbed him by the arms, and led him out and when he realized they intended to put him in a holding cell he began struggling. Three more uniforms joined the fray and the five of them succeeded in muscling the man into the cell.

  He didn’t understand what had just happened to him, didn’t speak Kreyol, spoke but a few words of French, and nobody would speak to him in English. He wanted to call the embassy, call a lawyer,
the manager of the hotel, call anybody, but nothing was getting across. The sun went down, nobody comes. A little later someone brought him a carton of warm orange juice and a plate of beans and rice, and then that’s it, they left him there alone throughout the night.

  So you’re my client, said Dolan. How do you think you’re feeling right now?

  Jesus, Tom said. In shock, enraged.

  Something like that, said Dolan. So listen to this.

  The next day, they took him out to the street where a black Chevy Blazer with smoked windows was parked at the curb and they put him in the backseat between a security officer from the embassy and an investigator from the National Police. In the front seat was a civilian from the consulate, who handed the client’s passport back to him with a plane ticket and explained that the Haitian police would not release his luggage and personal effects because he had refused to sign his statement. The consul also told him not to despair, that his wife’s body had already been shipped back to her family in Washington, DC. Despite the client’s repeated questions, the answer is always the same—he’s being deported—which sounds pretty good to him about this time, right? Just get me the fuck out of here, he’s thinking.

  They drove to the airport, through the security fence, and onto the tarmac, right to the boarding stairs on the American Airlines flight to the States. The client was the last passenger, the attendants closed the door behind him and showed him to his seat in the first-class section where, with his first sip of complimentary scotch, the man of course began to feel that he was waking up from a very bad dream.

  But now listen to this, said Dolan. My client steps off the plane in Miami and two marshals take him into custody. Next thing he knows he’s downtown at the federal courthouse being arraigned before a judge.

  On what charges?

  Dolan rattled off some numbers identifying the statutes. Murder of an American citizen on foreign soil. Conspiracy to kill an American citizen on foreign soil.

  Your guy staged a hit on his wife? asked Tom, who frowned at the sound of this, for he had grown accustomed to the presence of death in his life, cold-blooded senseless slaughter, murder on so vast a scale he sometimes felt like the impresario of his own necropolis, and these gangster words sounded ridiculous and puny.

  Christ. Maybe. Who knows? said Dolan. My client is not an upstanding citizen. He’d taken out some insurance policies on her, which is not a troublesome fact until the Haitian police notify the embassy that an American has been murdered and they have her husband and he’s being, in their words, uncooperative.

  Given the going rate for assassins on the island and the incompetence of its police force, if you wanted to make your wife disappear into oblivion, Haiti was an accommodating country. And yet if Dolan’s client were innocent, Tom thought, how would you begin to measure such injustice, the horrific multiplication of wrongs?

  The Bureau sent a team down there to poke around, said Conrad Dolan, but it was a dry fuck.

  Business as usual.

  Well, it puzzles me.

  I would guess then that you’ve never been to Haiti.

  There you have it, said Dolan, finally able to make his point. So, look, I’ve got to go down there for a couple of days and piece this thing together and I need somebody who knows his way around, right? You came to mind.

  I’m going to have to think about it, Tom said.

  Murder? his wife said later that evening, intrigued, her dry amusement peppered with irony, while they prepared for bed, as if Tom had only now discovered the novelty of America’s greatest form of entertainment, as if what he had been looking for out beyond the horizon was flourishing in his own backyard. I thought this isn’t the sort of thing you care about, she said, unless a government is pulling the trigger. What was it about a straightforward domestic homicide, she wondered, that now appealed to him?

  It’s Dolan, he said. And of course it was not a simple homicide, because it was Haiti.

  Like an object snatched from the top of a junk pile, Haiti had been collected by the genteel world, the world of infinite possibility, turned over in its manicured hands, sniffed and shaken, and discarded back on the heap. With the arrival of the Americans in 1994, Tom could not quite fathom the magnitude of their power or the grandness of its orchestration and was struck, like everyone else on the ground, by a naked sense of wonder, the beautiful bay that mocked the seaside slums floating an armada of enormous warships, glittering at night like waterborne villages on oceanic prairies, the dark waves of Black Hawk helicopters fluttering insectlike against the orange screen of sunset. Tanks on the garbage-piled streets. Marines huddled in igloos of sandbags. Grenades exploding in crowds, crowds exploding in joy. A blubbering macoute lynched from a signpost on Martin Luther King Boulevard, piss cascading off the dusty toes of his bare feet. A dead schoolgirl in a frilly pink dress lying in the street with her face burnt off to a matching pinkness. The Special Forces injected like antivenin into the hinterlands, liberating the villages. The peasants lining the road to cheer America! America! America! The soldiers hammering the roofs back on schools, digging wells, feeding children, handing out democracy like sweets.

  And then the idea behind the thing became unclear and atrophied and no matter who made it, a white man or a black man, every promise was a type of fantasy, if not an earnest lie, each hope an illusion, every sacrifice an act of unrequited love. Once again in Haiti there was no glory and too little honor and too much of God’s indifferent truth. The army arrived in thunder and left in a foul haze of smoke, having performed a magnificent pantomime of redemption, and throughout it all Harrington carried on with his work, the many, many graves he was obliged to locate, some as fresh as his morning’s breakfast but others grassed over and as big as swimming pools, his pursuit of the dead undeterred by futility until the day arrived when he, too, turned to walk away from it all.

  It seems to me that your world and Dolan’s are much the same, his wife said.

  He had watched his wife undress, disappointed because he seemed to merit the teasing reward of the colorful silks of new lingerie only on the nights of his homecomings, when she yielded to their lovemaking with varying degrees of eagerness; then the ritual was discarded for drab synthetics and stained sports bras and the familiar inertia of fifteen years of marriage. He believed in people trying to comfort one another but the comfort he found with her came from the life they had made together more than what she might or could provide by herself alone, the attention she afforded him no longer the precious commodity of their youth, and in the previous year when he had confessed in the heat of an argument that she no longer excited him, she set her eyes upon him in a fury and hissed, Haven’t you had enough excitement, Tom? Haven’t you had more than your share?

  Dolan has a different perspective.

  And I thought you’d gotten beyond your death wish, she said, her way of being droll, sliding into bed beside him and picking up her book from the nightstand.

  I have. I’m staying away from the working girls at the Oloffson.

  These unsubtle banterings between husband and wife were the gloss on so much tension and unspoken dread, a glib pattern that contorted into foolish promises to not do anything stupid and cold pragmatic decisions like medical evacuation plans and life insurance policies. Dolan’s client had one on his wife, Tom’s wife had one on him.

  I thought you were done with Haiti. Diddled out.

  Don’t try to shame me, either.

  Like everyone else who had swarmed to Haiti during the intervention—the soldiers, the journos, the diplomats, the spooks, the analysts and lawmakers and civil servants, the aid workers, the deal makers, the pimps of the spectacle—Tom Harrington had abandoned the country to its fog of misery. Everyone had left, with or without regrets, with or without bitterness, letting the island drift away from consciousness on a raft of indiffe
rence, the more cynical among them muttering that the country was too fucked even to throw a good war.

  His wife knew very well that he nourished an investment in Haiti, not of money or blood but of inexplicable hope, and she knew he could navigate the streets of its capital better than those of Dade County, and that he had adapted to the rhythms of its futility to the extent that he saw, perhaps wrongly, the people’s lives in Haiti as extraordinarily difficult but ordinary nevertheless, and not exempt from grace. Tom admitted he even liked the island, though it made him afraid—the idea of it, the dark myth, his anticipation of its treachery—but almost never when he was there on the ground, slogging about through its landscape of ruination.

  And a simple murder, yes. He couldn’t explain that compulsion more than he’d tried. Without a single expectation he felt drawn to Conrad Dolan, Dolan’s unnamed client, and his case. A domestic homicide, a violence between a husband and a wife, had become worthy of Tom’s time—surely no more than forty-eight hours; it had become a vaguely vulgar but compelling opportunity. The sensation was embarrassingly odd, but somehow the transition, the funneling down from the carnage he had witnessed in many of the world’s most violent places to the events surrounding the fate of two individuals struck him as inevitable, a predetermined sequence in the ongoing education that would lead him home, once and for all, having learned whatever lesson still eluded him. And what lesson might that possibly be that had yet to take hold? Love thy neighbor, or exterminate the brutes?

  Several mornings later he met the unimposing Dolan at their gate in the Miami airport, dressed in the clothes he had described to Tom on the phone—khaki pants, a collegial blue button-down cotton shirt, a navy blazer, and tasseled loafers—the uniform of Florida’s retired power brokers. Dolan had described himself as looking like a debauched Irishman who had taken a wrong turn coming out of Fenway Park but actually he reminded Tom of the old parish priest whom he had once served as altar boy at his grandparents’ church in the cold streets of Burlington, Vermont. Dolan was considerably shorter than Tom, round-bellied, and older than Tom had surmised from his voice. His white hair was balding on both sides of what Tom supposed he could call a widow’s peak, and he wore wire-rim glasses, the thick lenses cut in an aviator’s style. Some people who choose to carry a badge can’t hide the fact of their profession merely by dressing out in street clothes; there’s no day off for their aura of authority, their congenital need to scrutinize. Tom had observed them from the periphery in Haiti, an ensemble of high-end cops, the exotica of law enforcement, special agents and security officers and God knows what in blue jeans and business suits, bureaucrats with shoulder holsters, stiff with prosecutorial self-confidence, much like Harrington’s classmates at Yale law school, arrogant and dismissive in their brilliance but dull outside the clubhouse, of no apparent use to Haiti beyond their ability to spend money and scare people with their profound whiteness.