The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (52 page)

Be quiet, I love you, I’ll do it, she said. What do you want me to do?

There is so much we will never know. Maybe she was conflicted about her choices. Maybe she rationalized: What is $200,000 to my parents? Maybe she bargained: I will pay them back silently one day. I will hire a lawyer to set up a blind trust in the Bahamas. I’ll be making neurosurgery money. I’m good for it. Or maybe her motives were darker, maybe she had simmering resentments, and the thought of his beautiful knees broken tipped the pot. Perhaps whatever second thoughts she might have had couldn’t match the power of the promise she had made without knowing what it was she was promising: Be quiet, I love you, I’ll do it. I need you to tell me, he said: Who is the most terrible person you know? It has to be a truly despicable person, the worst person, a person other people would believe capable of the craziest, the most vulgar, the most violent things otherwise beyond imagining.

Her answer was the same as anyone’s answer would have been, under the circumstances: Charles Leblanc, nineteen years old, the son of Canadian missionaries who ran an orphanage in Delmas. He’d been kicked out of the Baptist school for carrying a knife, then reinstated despite massive faculty resistance the following year. He’d been seen driving around town with the gang that called themselves the Dominoes, waving a Glock out the passenger side window. It was said he wore white sneakers he had stolen from a fifteen-year-old Polish boy at gunpoint. He liked to brag about his connections with several of the kidnap gangs, the
chimères
, those lost boys who had been raised out of the slums of La Saline and Cité Soleil. Even their name a secret:
chimères
, specters invisible of body, ghosts. Don’t call me Charles Leblanc, he’d been saying. That’s my slave name. I’m giving up my Canadian passport. I was born in Pétion-Ville. I’m as Haitian as anybody. I’m as revolutionary as anybody. I’m as badass as anybody.

He wanted to be known instead, far and wide, as the white
chimère.
He said one day he’d be the richest man in Haiti. One day, he said, he would handpick the president with his money. He’d have the country’s mineral wealth privatized, buy it for a pittance, sell it to the Russians on the open market, build a national network of trains to link his factories to seaports, die wealthy as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. The bourgeois kids scoffed at this boasting—
Watch out, ladies, here comes the white chimère!
—but after a classmate, a fellow Canadian, shorthanded it to Casper, as in the Friendly Ghost, this classmate was accosted outside his house one day and pistol-whipped, and he would never say by whom, so you knew, everyone knew, and Leblanc got what he wanted from the whole affair: a little respect, a little deference, a little fear.

Tell Leblanc you have been thinking about him, the boyfriend said. Ask him if he’d like to hang out for a little while after school. Tell him you aren’t one hundred percent sure you want to fuck him. Tell him you are only ninety-six percent sure. Tell him you’ll decide on the road to Boutilliers. Tell him you’ll ride with him, no problem. Make sure twenty or thirty people see you get in his truck.

So she did. She told him that morning, and Leblanc spent the rest of the day bragging to the other boys. I’m going to bag the Beirut princess, he said. He pantomimed a little tiara on her head. At lunch he stared at her across the cafeteria, and she smiled sweetly at him. She told the other girls at her table he’d invited her over to help him study, but she had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Something was off by a degree and a half. Don’t go, they said. Maybe I won’t, she said. But then, after school was over, she made a show of dropping her books in the parking lot dirt, and a few people came over to help her pick them up, and when they were safely in her arms, she got into Leblanc’s truck. First, Boutilliers, she said, and they drove away, down one set of mountains, through the city, in the direction of another. Somewhere in between—no one has been able to establish with any certainty where—she asked him to make a quick unscheduled stop, and that was when they both disappeared for a few days.

When I was downtown, I liked to ride the tap-taps to hear the local versions of the news I was supposed to be reporting, and that’s where I was when I first heard about the disappearance of Anna Nasser. I was among people I mostly knew, at whose tables I had taken meals. Ghislaine said the ransom note was written in blood on paper made from the skin of babies. Yves said the ransom note was sewed inside a pouch full of poison. Yvette said the ransom note was sent by text message from a Digicel phone near the smaller airport in Port-au-Prince. Serge said the ransom note was hand-delivered by three masked men in a red truck. Prudeut said there was no ransom note, just a raspy voice on the phone and a lot of heavy breathing: Two hundred thousand dollars for the rich girl.

Not all of these things turned out to be true, but there was a text message from the smaller airport, and there was a raspy voice. Smallpox doesn’t spread any faster than gossip, and there’s always a little bit of the devastating and true stowed away like an urchin child among the more ostentatious baggage, the steamer trunk wardrobes and the suitcases with the leopard-print slipcovers.

When her father gets the phone call, he is in bed with a woman who is not his wife. She is a good woman, and his wife is a good woman, which makes him believe that, in this moment, he is a bad man. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe by now he’s come to think of these liberties as due compensation for the low-to-the-ground life he’s lived in service to the futures of others, all those long days in the store or at the port, all those late hours hunched over the accounting books, the imported bottle of Glenlivet untouched at the edge of the desk for the sake of clarity with the all-important numbers. Her leg is thrown over him, this woman he believes to be truly beautiful, whose aesthetic interests align with his, her good taste in music, her sense with fashion, her ease at talking. He loves her voice; he loves the smell of her; he steals what hours he can to sit with her in the evenings and talk and listen to records. He can imagine a future with her, but it is an unlikely future. More often his fantasies run in the other direction, toward a past where he met her as a young man, and the world and time spread unknown before them, perhaps in an easier country, perhaps in a Costa Rican villa, perhaps in an oceanside house in Belize, not far from Francis Ford Coppola’s, California wine in the evening, sophisticated conversation, movie actors, cigarettes.

Two hundred thousand dollars for the rich girl. First the phone call, then the text message. Come alone. Bring $10,000 in $100 bills. Have exactly $190,000 in a new account, and bring the account numbers. Don’t tell your wife. Don’t call the police. For all you know, this might be the police. Believe, now and forever, that you are speaking with the police. Be ready at all hours. Keep the phone near your head. We came for her, didn’t we, like a thief in the night? We came, didn’t we, on blood horses in the sky? We came, didn’t we, with knives and automatic rifles? In the fullness of time we’ll call. We’ll tell you when and where. Take off your shirt, get in your car, drive to the place. Keep her safe. Don’t make her unsafe because of your bad behavior. The time is now to start making good choices. Listen to the sound of my voice. I’m your best friend, Samir Nasser. You have no better friend in the world.

Twelve hours passed. He put on his good suit. He made quiet inquiries with friends whose children had been kidnapped and ransomed, but they all had American passports. They had the FBI. There would be no FBI for Samir Nasser. He went to the banks and did his business, and his bankers thought nothing of what he’d asked. He’d asked for more in the past, quickly, and anyway it was not a country where bankers felt it prudent to ask too many questions of businessmen.

When the call came, he was ready. He took the money. He took off his shirt. Delmas 73, the voice said, and he drove there and waited. The parking lot of the police station, the voice said, and he drove there and waited. Do you have the money? Yes. Good. Drive to the Lesly Center near the cathedral and wait. He did. Do you want to see your daughter alive? Yes. Good.

Drive to the Marché Hyppolite and park on the street and wait. Do you see that man on the street in the white shirt? Do you see that woman selling lettuce? We have eyes by the hundreds. You must be humble. Have you been humble in your life, Samir Nasser? Are we good friends? Touch the bag with the money. Take off your pants. Fold them. Set them in the passenger seat. Put them back on. You can’t walk out into the street, a rich man without pants. Walk in the direction of the palace. See that tree? Set the money there. Don’t worry. We are watching the tree. Walk away. Get in the car. Drive toward home. You will await further instructions. It’s not yours to know when. You’ve done well, Samir Nasser. Tonight you may drink for pleasure. Kiss your banker for me.

It was three days before he saw his daughter again. He went on the radio to make his plea. I’ve paid the money. I’ve done all you’ve asked. Be honorable, he said.

There was a general buzzing throughout the province. Everyone agreed that the
chimères
had taken her because her parents owned the Beirut. People argued about the nature of the Lebanese: All Lebanese are thieves. Is it wrong to steal from thieves? Fewer Lebanese are thieves than Haitians are thieves. Everything in Haiti belongs to Haitians, not to the Lebanese. All the children of the world belong to their parents. All the children of Lebanon belong in Lebanon. She was born in Haiti. Her mother and father were born in Haiti, and their mothers and fathers. She is a Haitian citizen. She travels with a Haitian passport. She is
blan.
She is Haitian. She is bourgeois. She is a human being. She is a parasite in the intestine.

Samir washed his face three times daily. He rubbed his wife’s shoulders. The house filled with relatives he was expected to feed at all hours, and Samir told his wife not to tell anybody anything. Maybe there’s a spy among us, he said. He told the relatives in the house that they must be strong. In the bathroom, beneath the Levantine crucifix, he pissed blood. He had a vision of Lake Pontchartrain, a body of water he’d once crossed by bridge in the company of a woman from Boston. He was upset by the unnecessary word
chimère.
These were young men, not ghosts. But what was more disturbing, the taking of his daughter by young men or ghosts? The beating of his daughter by young men or ghosts? The sexual assault of his daughter by young men or ghosts? Young men had bodies. Young men could torment bodies with bodies. Ghosts could only torment the mind, the spirit. Ghosts could slip into the invisible night, flee on a carriage of warm air, ride some passing storm, stir it into a hurricane, but young men could be hunted down and killed, and Samir felt capable of killing. He felt the ferocity of a father, the skull inkwell from which he’d pen the fated names the moment he learned them.

Then it was three o’clock in the morning. He was sitting on the front porch with the night watchman when the buzzer rang from the gate, where she stood wrapped in a sheet she said she had stolen from a laundry line, and the owner of the sheet had chased her through the streets for half a kilometer. We must pay her for the sheet, she said, and he picked her up, cradled like a child, and carried her into the house, and kissed her cheek and her forehead, and didn’t even tell anyone she was home, and rocked her in her mother’s gliding chair, and pressed her cheek to his cheek, and together they wept until they woke her mother, and then the room was full of people, and he sent them out into the yard, and told the night watchman to turn on the yard lights, and told the cook to bring out the food and set it on picnic tables, and they went into the bedroom, the three of them, and got into the bed, under the covers, husband and wife and daughter in the middle, the way they had when she was a newborn baby, and they cooed without embarrassment, made all the same sounds they had made when she was a newborn baby, and touched her face, and her back, and stroked her hair the same way they had when she was a newborn baby, and the whole room filled with the rank, unwashed smell of her, and her mother drew her a bath, and her father set her in it, and he left the room as her mother washed her.

On the radio, the priest from Bel Air said enough is enough. Is this not our country? he said. We must claim it for decency. All children are ours. I will provide the candles, and we will raise them to the sky, and all the saints will be reflected in the flames, and all our ancestors.

The procession wound through the city, the marchers and their candles, and others joined them as they marched. When she appears on the balcony, her mother said, she must be wearing a white dress like a baptismal dress, and they summoned the tailor, and quickly, while she had the curlers in her hair, the dress was made ready.

Here again: ugliness and beauty. What was it like for her to look at herself in the mirror in the supermarket fur shop, her hair in dark ringlets to her shoulders, the white dress, the waiting crowd, the grieving and rejoicing parents, the boyfriend on his way to the airport with the bag of cash, the preparation of the fireworks, the secret knowledge opening a void inside her. You are a woman, and I have treated you like a child, her father said. He put his hands on her shoulders. When you get to Rhode Island, don’t come back. Don’t write for a while. Don’t call. Put this place behind you. But before you go, if you can bear it, tell me the faces, tell me the names, whatever you know, I will put an end to their comfort.

What did it feel like, for her, to say Leblanc? At that moment, he was holed up in a dank house in Carrefour, smoking opium for the fourth day in a row. Charles Leblanc, she said. He said he needed help studying. He tricked me. He stowed me with his street friends. They put me in a house with a rooster stenciled above the door.

Already her father was on the phone. An hour later a contingent of Chilean soldiers attached to a UN peacekeeping mission took a battering ram to the flimsy front door of the opium den in Carrefour, and when Leblanc reached for his Glock, they shot him in the arm, and it dangles limp to this day. On the radio, the police said it was not yet time to rest easy. We have apprehended the white
chimère
, but he is not the only
chimère.
We will not rest until all
chimères
, black and white, have been apprehended. On the balcony, Samir spoke of justice and the rule of law, but on the phone with the magistrate, he said, Put him in the malarial cell, the tubercular cell, stick him with eleven murderers in a cell made for two or four, and the magistrate said, You know as well as I do that I can’t do that. He’s white. He’s Canadian. He gets books and magazines and as many meals as his mother and father want to bring him. I might bring him a television myself.