Haiti Noir

She opened her mouth to scream even louder, but this time no sound came out. There was just a feeling of suffocation as the iron attacked her flesh. The man grunted and shrieked with an animalistic joy. The pain grew so unbearable that she could no longer yell. He, however, was laughing as he hammered his hips into hers. Finally, the pain became so intense that she lost consciousness.

At Solange’s house, her cell phone rang again.

“Hello. Madame, it’s me. Is the money ready?” the deep voice snapped sharply.

“Sir,” Solange said in a quavering voice, “I can give you two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. That’s all we could put together.”

“What! You’re leaving the half-million behind and talking about two hundred thousand? Madame, I’ll call you later.” Bang! The same message showed up on the cell phone’s screen: Private number.

While Solange waited, it felt to her as though the entire city was in mourning. Above the hills, a series of curling black clouds, sympathy clouds, draped the sky like a flock of bad-omen birds. Her eyes puffy from crying, Solange scolded herself between sobs. She should have never let that girl go to Portail Léogâne. She should have agreed to the halfmillion dollars that the kidnappers were demanding. She should have told Davernis to take Rosanna directly to Les Cayes.

Her philosophical neighbor tried to reason with her: “Madame, if the kidnappers were following your Rosanna, they would have found a way to get to her. Most of these kidnappings are well planned, you know.”

The phone rang again.

“Hello, madame. A quarter-million U.S. dollars will do.”

“Okay,” Solange said, regaining her sang-froid, “but I need proof that she is still alive.”

The afternoon drizzle started again. A smell of doom seemed to hang in the air. Rows of children were making their way home from school. Beggars sat with their hands stretched toward the sky, perhaps waiting for the love of God that had been promised by evangelists of all stripes. Solange had just left Sogebank, the philosopher neighbor at her side and a briefcase full of money on her lap. Davernis was driving. In the car, no one said anything. There was both too much and too little to say.

The booted man walked quickly down the dark alley leading to Rosanna’s prison. He leapt over the piles of trash that littered the narrow alleys. The smell of decomposing flesh lingered in the air. He finally reached the front door of the cement shack.

Tok! Tok! Tok! Three quick knocks on the black metal door was the signal he had agreed on with the guard who was inside with the girl, but there was no need for this. The door was open and both the guard and the girl were gone.

The briefcase full of money under her arm, and her philosopher neighbor still at her side, Solange had Davernis drive her to the rendezvous spot, a dead-end street not far from her house, which overlooked a crowded cement shack-filled neighborhood below. At the entrance to the labyrinthine neighborhood was a trash heap that was always smoldering.

An hour went by: nothing. No Rosanna, no kidnappers!

Solange felt heartbroken and discouraged. Would everything truly end this way for Rosanna?

Her philosopher friend for once had no words of comfort or enlightenment. Finally her cell phone rang, and Davernis answered it.

“That was Melanie, madame,” Davernis said a moment later from the front seat. “Someone was going by and recognized Mademoiselle Rosanna in the trash heap down there.”

“What do you mean they recognized her?” Solange asked.

“She is dead, madame,” Davernis explained, his eyes filling up with tears, “and her body in such bad condition that only some of her is identifiable.”

“Then how do they even know? How can they even tell it’s her?” Solange pounded her fist on the suitcase full of money, crying like a child. Her mind, her body it seemed, was drifting into the past, back to the Canapé Vert hospital where she’d visited her brother’s wife the day Rosanna was born, back to Rosanna’s baptism where she had promised to take over the parental duties should anything happen to her brother and his wife, back to the night that she’d learned of their death and had felt both agony and elation at the possibility of raising the girl herself.