The Spy's Little Zonbi (23 page)

“
I ask my brudders and sisters to entrust in me their faith as their new leader in this hour of turmoil. Faith must be enforced by reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.” Moreau clasped his dainty hands in front of his chin and closed his eyes tightly. “But I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, his greatest fulfillment of all he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle—victorious.”

Mahatma Gandhi, Vince Lombardi, and Jean Luc Moreau all rolled into one.

Moreau opened his eyes slowly, head nodding in a satisfied manner. He waited for applause, or maybe for Chase to dab his eyes, perhaps forgetting for a moment that he was just a journalist with pen and pad. Picking up the cue, Moreau's cameraman did start clapping, but Chase continued his scribbling.

He finished jotting the last line and closed his notebook.

“
We done now, boss?” Moreau's cameraman asked from over the reporter's shoulder.

“
Oui
! I believe my message is clear like a bell. Make a copy for our guest to take with him.”

“
That would be fantastic.” Chase packed away his notebook and recorder. “May I use your bathroom?”

Instead of answering, Moreau barked for one of his workers in some other room to fetch his driving gloves. His cameraman had begun the intricate task of unscrewing the camera from the tripod.

“
Come, time for a tour of my humble ranch.” He pulled on velvety kid-leather gloves brought to him by the man who'd driven Chase to the ranch. “You need pictures of me and I have a wonderful spot which will be perfect. It will be a photo of me with
fanmi
mwen
, my family.”

Moreau led them back to the Jeep and Chase climbed into the front passenger seat, carefully stowing the backpack between his legs. Moreau had donned a white Panama hat and the kind of oversized wrap-around sunglasses usually found on slow-driving retired folks in Florida. He seemed somewhat entranced following his successful interview-turned-rallying-cry, soon to be delivered to the masses. Chase had to piss like crazy, but still needed to know about this accent.

“
Where did you learn to speak English so brilliantly?”

Moreau paused before popping the Jeep into reverse. He struggled to pull a new, larger handkerchief from his back pocket. He removed the Panama with his left hand and rubbed tight circles all around his sweaty, black bald head with his right.

“
As a young boy, my father took me away to the New York borough of Brooklyn. It was in 1963, I believe. My wonderful father was a proud man, with no fear of speaking his mind. But unfairness followed him because of his brave words. Sadly, my mother was coerced to stay behind, as the criminal Duvalier forced our exodus.”

Chase took from this that his father was booted from the country and the boy was taken along because his mother didn't want to go.

“
It was in a small restaurant in Brooklyn that my father toiled as a waiter. It was during these years that he taught me the value of hard work. And it was during this period that another Haitian ex-patriot began working side by side with Papa. But this was an evil man who did not believe in the brotherhood of men and families forced from the homeland. Instead, he stole my father's tips. And when he stole the tips of other waiters, he blamed my father.”

Chase interpreted this to mean Moreau's father was a thief.

They sat in the idling Jeep, the rancher's gloved hands locked on the steering wheel as he stared off into the hazy sky.

“
The restaurant owner confronted my father with the weakest of evidence, nothing more than the words of a lying turncoat pig. And my father defended his honor mightily. When the owner tried taking my father's life with a kitchen knife, Papa had no choice but to kill him.”

Moreau's father murdered the restaurant owner when he tried firing him, Chase concluded.

“
And do you know who the treacherous thief was?”

Having long ago read excerpts of Préval's biography, Chase recalled that he'd been a waiter in Brooklyn for five years before returning to Haiti. “President Préval?”

“
Yes,
oui, oui
!” Moreau shouted gleefully, fully reinvigorated to his post-speech state. “My journalist friend, you are very smart to know what kind of man Rene Préval is. He is a dog!
Yon
chyen
!”

Moreau jammed the gear shift into reverse, spinning tires, and Chase almost smashed the windshield with his forehead. Back in forward motion, he led them in the opposite direction from which he'd arrived, and that was fine with Chase. He was curious about a better escape route, one that didn't lead past the zombie factory. The driveway was narrow at that point and some of the workers were armed. Chase wasn't worried about the zombies, but sure didn't want to provide spare parts for any of those lunatic undead dollmakers.

The Jeep bumped down the rutted drive, jolting Chase's bursting bladder, as Moreau happily gestured toward the panorama of marijuana plants.

“
You know your first American president was rich because of his marijuana crops,” Moreau shouted over the engine noise and splashing puddles. “It is a plant that brings joy and not the suffering of tobacco.”

“
Yes, I read that George Washington grew marijuana.” Chase clutched the door handle and dashboard to keep from flying out. Moreau was going much too fast and nearly ran over a few of the half-buried zombies that lined the road as they made their way down the mountain, away from the ranch. Chase wouldn't have been surprised if Moreau credited Lincoln with using zombies as scarecrows to help emancipate the slaves.

Moreau brought the Jeep to a skidding halt and a cloud of dust caught up and consumed them. Here was a clutch of small concrete buildings, ten in all, neat but with a haze of cooking fires and a heavy stench of raw sewage. They were just beyond the far edge of Moreau's fields, in a dry ravine, maybe a half-mile from the main house. Chase was disappointed at the dead end. No escape route here.

“
Fanmi mwen
!” Moreau proudly declared, rising on the Jeep's floorboard, knees against the steering wheel. He made a sweeping gesture with his Panama hat to bundles of native blankets huddled in the open doorways of most of the buildings. As Moreau dismounted, the bundles began to lurch toward them, crawling, limping, or dragging themselves in a slow-moving rush.

Some of the blankets began to fall away, getting caught on this or that or abandoned to get to Moreau faster. Chase saw that Moreau's family members were lepers, maybe thirty souls inflicted with Hansen's Disease, all making their way toward their smiling benefactor.

“
Such a terrible, terrible disease.” Moreau seemed genuinely distraught. “This is the suffering of my people which goes ignored. They are shunned by Préval and his followers and so are shunned by everyone out of respect and fear of that thieving pig.”

As the sorrowful, ragtag mob reached Moreau, Chase backed up to the Jeep, dug out his Nikon and quickly took a light reading off his palm. Those able to hobble over first now sat resting with the others at Moreau's feet. All had their hands outstretched, begging in Haitian Creole, but Chase couldn't believe even a native would understand all the excited wheezing and hissing; most were missing noses and lips. The disease, which flourished in the cooler oral and nasal membranes, had rotted the flesh and opened nasal cavities.

Moreau removed a clear plastic bag of jerky from his pocket and gave each one a small piece. Those with no arms he fed directly, like baby birds, but Chase noticed Moreau kept his driving gloves on. He used his twenty-four millimeter lens for these photos—the wide-angle lens Limp had once recommended because of its great depth of field—giving the scene a “You are there” quality. A lot of work in dangerous countries requires long telephotos for most pictures, but Chase was ignored here. There was food in Moreau's hands and these people didn't seem to see much of it on a regular basis. Nobody cared or even noticed they were being photographed, except Moreau, of course. He was puffing his chest, chin held high over his loyal family, offering the camera his best side.

“
A society will be judged by how it treats its weakest members,” Moreau proclaimed over his shoulder. Was that Truman?

“
There is a change coming, my journalist friend.” Moreau removed his gloves and placed them inside the empty food bag. He handed the gift to an old man with milky gray eyes who seemed to have most of his fingers intact. The leper tried tasting the gloves before realizing what they were. He stuffed them down his shredded pants and crawled away.

With the food gone, the rest of the lepers began their struggle to return to their own doorways. Chase had to piss that very second and told Moreau so.

“
Please go back up the hill to the field.” He gestured toward the lush growth, smiling broadly. “The plants love the urine of humans. Then we'll have some more photographs.”

As Chase climbed over a small rock wall that delineated the edge of the pot field, he was startled by yet another bundle of twitching rags and blankets. It was an elderly woman, also a leper, but in a more advanced stage of the disease than the others. Much too debilitated to have crawled over the low wall for the jerky treats, Chase wondered how she'd found herself on this side of the barrier.

She sat propped against the jagged stones. “
Blanc
,
blanc
,” she whispered hoarsely, her tongue extending out beyond her teeth to make the sound. No lips, no nose, and only one remaining eye. But the fact that she called him a
blanc
—a white—meant she could still see through the gray, cloudy glop. A filthy scarf covered seeping sores on her head. Gigantic flies swarmed her lazily, in no particular rush, as if they knew they couldn't be swatted.

“
Hello.” Chase paused, didn't know what else to say. His bladder cramping, he shifted from foot to foot.

“
Blanc
,” she repeated and, with what seemed like great effort and pain, began fishing with one hand inside the clump of rags she wore. She nearly toppled, but finally came up with what she was searching for.

Chase couldn't wait. “I'm sorry, I'll be right back.” He held up one finger, gesturing that he needed a minute. He jogged about thirty feet into the low mass of pungent pot plants, unzipped his fly and peed in an almost never-ending stream. His eyes teared as he soaked a dozen plants, spraying an arc that rained down three rows up the hill. Through blurry eyes he saw two sweat-slick black laborers about fifty yards across the field, spreading what might be fertilizer by hand from large packs on their backs. Ever-present machetes dangling from their belts, they paid no mind to the pissing
blanc
.

With the pain drained away and leaves dripping all around as if from a spring shower, he turned and made his way back to the old woman, careful not to crush any little plants.

“
Blanc
.” The women nodded down at her hand, reaching up toward him. She held out a small object wrapped in dirty cloth, offering it to Chase as some sort of gift. Her hand began shaking violently and he bent down to accept the item, mostly to stop the awful shaking. He feared her hand might break off.

Then, his blood froze as she spoke in perfectly clear English, “Take me with you,
blanc
. Take me with you.”

He was about to return the small shrouded object when a loud racket broke out somewhere back in the leper compound. First screams, then angry shouting. He turned from the woman, jumped across the wall and ran back to where he'd left Moreau.

The first thing Chase noticed as he came past the Jeep was his backpack, open, on the passenger seat. He reached in and saw the can of poisoned nuts was missing.
Shit
! There was no immediate sign of Moreau or any of the lepers, but Chase assumed the rancher had noticed the can in the open bag and decided to continue spreading more good will to his family.

Shit! Shit! Shit!

He jogged to the nearest building and peered into the dark, only to see a frightened bundle cowering in the farthest corner. Chase turned, went to the next doorway and found a similar scene, just in a different corner.

He hurried back out to the shared fire circle in the center of small buildings and called out. “Mister Moreau? Hello?”

Chase was finally answered with more hissing screams just ahead, coming from the building farthest from the Jeep. He ran toward it, very aware that he had no weapon. And then he noticed the trail of nuts under his feet, leading the way like Hansel and Gretel. Instead of bread, it was a pecan here and a hazelnut there.
Shit! Shit! Shit!

“
Diable
!” The accusation came from inside, the voice joined by others shouting the same word. “Demon!” He stopped just before the threshold, taking some cover at the side of the door frame, and sneaked a peek inside, his hands craving a weapon, his heart hammering.

Inside, Moreau was naked from the waist down, his pants actually still attached at one ankle where they didn't get over his shoe, trailing him like a kite tail. His Panama hat was gone, as were his old man sunglasses. He was pinning down one of the bundles, grotesquely trying to work his small, erect penis inside one of the lepers. His black body was shaking and pouring sweat down on the hapless pile of rags and bones, whose pencil thin legs were exposed and spread apart like toothpicks poking from a raisin.