Haiti Noir

The two right tires of the jeep were flat and the vehicle was leaning to one side. This was hardly surprising: the road I’d gone down the night before could disable a tank on treads. I had to find someone who could repair the tires. There are always one or two people like that on the main street of every small provincial town. If I took the street back from the hotel, I’d surely find someone to help me. I walked for a good fifteen minutes. The whole town of Gokal was composed of one main street lined with little low houses with wooden lace cornices, all of them in disrepair and saturated with the surrounding gray dust. The road gave onto a little public square that I’d crossed the night before without realizing it. In the middle of this space rose the only tree worthy of the name, and around it was a church, a general store whose shelves seemed empty, and a few other houses in the same style as the main street. A little farther on, slightly behind the square, an open space must have been used as an outdoor market. The darker ground in this place suggested that the sale of charcoal must still support the dying economy of the town. I couldn’t see any sign of a police station. Didn’t the high command know that nothing-but nothing-happened in Gokal? On my way I only met a child carrying a bucket of water on his head, two old men sitting under the covered passageway of a rickety house, and a crippled woman squatting in a doorway. No able-bodied man in view. The situation seemed bad.

I was sweating profusely. The best thing to do was to go back to the hotel and ask my hostess for help. I didn’t like the idea. I felt I was at this woman’s mercy. But she had to know the resources of the town.

I found her sitting at the reception desk. “Look,” I immediately went up to her, “I’m sorry to bother you, madame, but I really need you to help me.”

“How may I help you, Commissaire Vanel?”

Once again I felt like a child who’d been caught out, scrutinized by an adult. What was happening to me? Normally I was the strong one. I was the one who asked the questions, doubted, pushed, intimidated people. I was the police officer, the expert sleuth. I represented authority. People were afraid of me. I knew all the methods of persuasion. What was happening to me? Why did this woman have such a strong hold over me?

I forced myself to go on. “Well, here’s the situation: I have two flat tires. So I have to find a repairman. I’m also looking for the local police station. My transfer happened pretty fast and I haven’t had time to bring myself up to speed on the town of Gokal.”

The lady seemed embarrassed, like someone who had to give someone else a piece of bad news. She fidgeted on her chair, leaned her head to one side, then to the other. Finally she said: “There are no tire repairmen here, Commissaire Vanel. As you must have noticed, there are no cars in Gokal.”

“No cars?”

“None.”

“But what about the customers who live in your hotel? And market days?”

She made an effort to continue the conversation, which clearly annoyed her. I was reduced to a child bombarding an irritated adult with questions.

“The hotel’s guests are very special. Most of them are people who’ve come here to rest, men who want to get away from the craziness of city life. Among them there are a few policemen, like you. Once they’ve come here, they send their cars back so they can enjoy their isolation more fully. They rarely leave their rooms. As for the market, every Tuesday a few trucks do come to pick up the bags of charcoal that people in the country around here carry in by donkey. And that’s all the traffic there is.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. How could the high command send me to a place like this? Why me, an elite police officer? Little by little, I was beginning to realize that I had been exiled, abandoned. I thought over my last conversation with Froset just before I jumped into my car to come to this wretched town. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seemed particularly surprised by the news of my transfer. I was too happy about the hotel recommendation to pay attention to his lack of interest in my situation. And yet I regarded him as a brother. Once I had risked my own life to save his, during a clash with a bunch of gangsters. He used to tell everybody he was eternally grateful to me. With him in the high command, I felt I had some protection.