When Death Comes for You Read online

Renée felt a hollow ache in her chest at the sight of that diamond. “What do you see in him?”

  “I don’t expect you to understand.” Gigi slipped the ring on her finger, covering the diamond with her hand as if to protect it. “I grew up in a house where . . . let’s just say, my father was not an honorable man. It killed my mother. Adam would never do that to me. He loves me.”

  “Adam Hartmann is not capable of love. You’ll never be happy married to him.”

  Gigi’s eyes hardened into flinty pebbles. “You’re no expert on marriage—your husband had more affairs than an oversexed alley cat. Didn’t you just file for divorce?”

  Renée recoiled, as much from the venom in Gigi’s voice as from the deep wound her words inflicted. “Why the hell are you and your fiancé delving into my private life?”

  A look of contrition settled on Gigi’s features. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.” She leaned forward with a pleading hand, and her robe slid off her shoulder. “For the first time in my life, I’ve found love. Real love. Can’t you be happy for me?”

  But Renée wasn’t listening. She was transfixed by the ribbon of bruises that crisscrossed the other woman’s shoulder. “What happened?” she gasped.

  Gigi looked down, then quickly covered herself. “Nothing. I’m a bit . . . a bit clumsy.”

  “Let me see.” She tried to move the robe aside, but Gigi leaped out of her seat.

  “Get out.”

  “But—”

  “Get the hell out of here, Renée. Now!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Do You Speak English?

  There was a storm coming. At dawn, the sky over Guantanamo was awash in shades of crimson. As darkness descended, wispy clouds covered the horizon like tendrils of smoke from a burning pot. I had seen such a storm before, had witnessed its devastation. I wanted to warn others, but who would believe me? No one ever listens to those who see the end coming. They didn’t believe Noah either.

  I stood at the kitchen window, all the while remembering how I got here. It had started on the morning of my first day in Port-au-Prince. I had woken up on the floor of a boardinghouse with a thin sheet for a mattress and my arms for a pillow. I was cramped and uncomfortable, but what did that matter? It was 1955, Haiti was in her Golden Age, and Port-au-Prince was the center of the world. There was so much to see. What was I doing still half-asleep?

  I jumped up and headed for the bathroom. Twenty minutes later, I was off on my first adventure. The streets teemed with people. A gaggle of young women walked home from the market with baskets of produce swaying on their heads. Four little girls crouched in a dusty courtyard playing oscelet, tossing a handful of dried cow bones in the air and then plucking and turning them with nimble fingers. A housewife perched on her balcony with a squirming toddler in her lap, neatly braiding the child’s hair despite the noisy protests.

  “Akasan twa goud,” a street merchant chanted as she draped a flowered cloth over a small table and laid out bowls of porridge for sale.

  Car horns blared from the roadway. Impatient drivers swerved to miss the slow-moving peyizan riding into town on the backs of donkeys. The women, in their long skirts, wrapped their heads in colorful bits of fabric. The men wore their straw hats low and chewed on stalks of sugar cane.

  In the alleyway, a young boy zigzagged through a crowd of Catholic schoolgirls. “Tablet pistach,” he said, holding out a basket of peanut brittle just as our paths crossed.

  My mouth watered. “Konbyen?”

  “De goud.”

  I reached in my pocket and counted out two bills, then added a few sentim coins for a tip. He handed me a bag of roasted peanuts set in a gooey sugar coating, flavored with cinnamon, nutmeg, and star anise. I popped one in my mouth and groaned with pleasure.

  A bright-yellow tap tap screeched to a halt a few feet away.

  “Rue Delmas. Grand Rue. Boulevard Harry Truman.” The conductor rattled off the next few stops while hanging half out of the bus.

  I climbed on just as the tap tap wheezed back into traffic. The bus made its way through the streets of Port-au-Prince, stopping every few minutes to take on more passengers. We were crushed so tightly, it hurt to breathe. When my stop came, I had to squeeze through a crowd three layers deep.

  Finally, I stood on the water’s edge and breathed the Caribbean Sea into my lungs. The waterfront smelled of freshly gutted fish, stray dogs, and rum. A giant ship hunkered in the ocean, unswayed by the ebb and flow of the waves. The ship yawned open, and tourists poured out. Americans. Germans. Spaniards. Some I didn’t recognize, and others I never knew. They all flocked to shore and descended on the rum merchants like starving pelicans. They guzzled one rum-laced coconut drink after another, not stopping to even bargain down the price. I shook my head in amazement—everyone knew you never paid first price.

  I spent the morning on the waterfront, then strolled down the tree-lined boulevards of the Champ de Mars, watching the fashionably dressed ruling class bustle off to work. A few streets over, facing the Place l’Ouverture, a massive two-story structure seemed to float in the air. Its Greek columns and domed pavilions gleamed white in the noonday sun, and its hundreds of windows stared back at me with the eyes of a curious observer. It wasn’t until I saw the red and blue of the Haitian flag flying in the breeze that I recognized the Palais Nationale. I laughed so hard I got the hiccups. Had I compared my little house in Saint-Marc to this?

  A stab of longing pierced my heart, but I pushed it away. Saint-Marc was another life, one I had left behind. I blinked back tears and pressed my face against the wrought iron gate shielding the palace. What would it be like to walk those halls? The National Palace was a symbol of hope for the Haitian people. Four times, we built a structure on these grounds, and three times it came crashing down. Angry rebels, angry leaders, and angry peasants had all taken a turn smashing the evidence of Haitian unity. But this National Palace had stood since 1920—maybe it would be the one to stand forever.

  The palace was home to President Paul Magloire, an army general who shoved the last occupant aside with the butt of a gun. “I am here to save Haiti from her Communist enemies,” Magloire declared. “I will put on my iron pants and get the job done.”

  While the Haitian people looked on with suspicion, Magloire did some good in the five years after the coup. New roads and schools went up, public buildings were refurbished. He was even constructing Haiti’s first dam—with help from his friends in America. The government said the dam would provide electricity for all Haitians, but we had our doubts. Magloire was known to favor his friends and vanquish his enemies. Those who benefited from his attention called him Bon Papa, the Good Father. Those who knew his wrath called him Kanson Fé. Iron Pants.

  Magloire’s American allies cheered him on. They put him on the cover of their Time magazine. President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon welcomed him with bright smiles to their White House. It made us more suspicious. Only twenty-one years had passed since the American occupation, and our memories were long.

  “Do you speak English?” a man asked in a thick American accent.

  I jumped back guiltily, as if I’d been caught scaling the palace wall. But it wasn’t a police officer who stared down at me. It was a tall, pale-faced god with eyes the color of amber. He might have been in his early twenties, if gods had birthdays. A smile curved his lips as he waited for my answer.

  “No English,” I said, shaking my head.

  The smile turned flirtatious. “Do you want to learn?”

  Philip was the child of a white-American marine and a light-skinned, highborn Haitian woman. His parents met in the last days of the American occupation. Theirs was a forbidden love—forbidden by the Americans, who believed all Haitians, no matter how rich and cultured, were inferior; and forbidden by the Haitian elite, who saw their American occupiers as barbarians.

  Philip came into the world on August 1, 1934, on the day the Americans pulled out of Haiti. A month later, his Haitian grandfather
arrived in North Carolina with a swaddled bundle in hand. The old man stepped out of his car, casting a disdainful glance at the hardscrabble tobacco farm that had been in Philip’s American family since the days of slavery.

  He approached the ex-marine standing on the porch of a run-down old farmhouse. “Voici ton bâtard,” the old man said. Here’s your bastard.

  Philip did not meet his mother until he was eighteen years old, but every year since, he spent a few months with her in Haiti. Despite that, he didn’t speak a word of Kreyòl—his mother forbade it.

  “You are not like these people,” his mother said when he begged to learn. These people were the dark-skinned, Kreyòl-speaking peasants who worked as her servants.

  We managed to communicate with a smattering of my schoolgirl French and the universal language of love. We drank Cuba Libres at the Club Aux Calebasses and danced the merengue, swinging our hips and grinding our bodies as rum coursed through our veins. We spent long days riding the Ferris wheel on the waterfront and licking shaved ice off each other’s palms. On sultry evenings, when birdsong and the wet-heat of hurricane season filled the air, Philip took me to the Théâtre de Verdure to watch the dancers of the Troupe Folklorique Nationale. I had never before seen the dance of my people put on stage for admiration.

  The only fight we ever had was when Philip tried to get me in the water. He took me to the Côte des Arcadins, a tourist beach on the west coast of Haiti. The water was a sparkling blue, so clear you could see all the way to the bottom.

  “Let’s swim,” he said, moving his arm in the motion of a wave.

  I shook my head.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he insisted, tugging at my arm. “I will teach you.”

  I screamed. My scream pierced the sand and waves, beckoning a crowd of tourists to come watch the crazy Haitian girl fall apart.

  Never again was there any talk of swimming.

  Philip rented a room at the Hotel Oloffson on Avenue Christophe, a nineteenth-century gingerbread mansion surrounded by palm trees and a lush garden. He told me the hotel’s guests were famous writers: Truman Capote, Noël Coward, Graham Greene.

  These strange names meant nothing to me. I told him of the hotel’s true history. It was once a private residence of the Sam family, a powerful political family that had given Haiti two of her presidents. The last one, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, remained in office only five months. The people turned against him when he slaughtered 167 political prisoners, including a former president. Sam fled to the French Embassy, seeking political asylum. He was not fast enough. A mob tore him to pieces in the street.

  It was then that President Woodrow Wilson ordered his marines to take Haiti. On July 28, 1915, my father stood on the dock in Port-au-Prince with a small crowd that had gathered to watch the spectacle. He saw the USS Washington come into port. He saw the marines march on Haitian soil, declaring martial law.

  “What is martial law?” my father asked a man in the crowd.

  The man spat on the ground. “They want to be our new masters.”

  The marines seized control of our property, including the Hotel Oloffson. For the nineteen years of US occupation, the mansion would be their military hospital—though they had few casualties. After they took our property, they took our people. They revived the corvée, a system of labor that forced Haitians to work the way our slave ancestors had once worked. It broke the people’s spirit. It broke my father.

  “Your Papa does not talk about these things?” I asked Philip in the mixture of French, Kreyòl, and pantomime that had become our language.

  He shook his head. “I don’t like war,” he said.

  As if he was not a child of war. As if the land where his umbilical cord was buried, and the one he called home, had not lurched from one war to the next since the time of Columbus.

  We made love on satin sheets with the smell of sugar cane and jasmine drifting into the room. When I finally learned to speak English, Philip was called back to America. His father needed him on the farm, and his fiancé was pregnant. I took him to the airport.

  He stood on the tarmac framed against the mountains and a Pan Am airplane. “Mouin renmein ou,” he said in that terrible American accent. I love you.

  When he left, I found occasional work as a domestic in the mansions dotting the hills of Pétionville, a gated suburb east of Port-au-Prince that Philip once called the Beverly Hills of Haiti. I cleaned for the elite, washed their clothes, walked their children to school. But I never cooked, not for anyone.

  The years passed in a blur of poverty and regret. Finally, I got a stable job in the home of a bon blan, one of the “good white families.” Their ties to the island went back to when Haiti was a jewel in France’s colonial crown. It was the first time I felt truly hopeful since I’d lost Philip.

  I thought life would finally bring me happiness, but my troubles had only just begun.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Rehearsal

  Who handles criminal investigations for the navy?” Renée asked as John drove into a school parking lot. He parked in the space closest to the entrance, ignoring a sign that read: “Reserved for Teacher of the Year, Anita Herman.”

  “You planning on something I should know about?” he asked, his tone only half-joking.

  “I’m trying to figure out how things work around here.” She forced a small laugh. His question hit too close to the mark.

  “It’s complicated.” He turned to her in time to catch the dirty look she sent his way.

  “I’ll try not to let it confuse me too much,” she said dryly.

  “Okay. Okay.” He threw up his hands in a sheepish apology. “If a navy man commits a crime off base, he’s subject to both civilian and military discipline. Civilian cause the crime took place out there, and military cause Uncle Sam owns his ass. Typically, unless they’re willing to defer to military justice, civilians take the lead on those crimes.”

  “What about on base? The US Naval Investigative Service takes charge, right?”

  He eyed her with growing interest. “Most people never heard of the NIS.”

  “They’re the ones investigating Tailhook,” she said.

  “You know about that?”

  She shrugged. “The legal community is like Guantanamo—word gets around.”

  In fact, Tailhook was fast becoming the biggest scandal to hit the US military since women were permitted to enlist. A conference in Las Vegas for naval and marine aviators—attended by the top brass, no less—had devolved into a drunken frat party. Female officers reported being groped, fondled, and forced to walk through a gauntlet of drunken hecklers. At least five women fought off a mob demanding they drink “Rhino Spunk.” The disgustingly named concoction—a mixture of rum, Kahlúa, milk, and ice cream—had to be sucked from a dildo attached to the mural of a bull rhinoceros. The rhino happened to be the squadron’s mascot.

  “Tailhook promises to be an uphill battle for the women who reported it,” Renée continued. “The military doesn’t take sexual assault seriously.”

  “You’re wrong there,” John said, a muscle twitching along his jawline. “Accusing a man of any kind of sexual misconduct can ruin his military career.”

  “And if he’s a civilian?” A chessboard of options played in her mind. The military was on the defensive right now. They couldn’t afford to ignore a reported sexual assault that happened on base—even between civilians.

  It might just work. It might be enough to get Adam Hartmann yanked back to New York.

  “What’s this about?” John asked, watching her closely.

  “I can’t say much more.” She couldn’t tell him the truth. Not yet. “I’m bound by ethical rules.”

  He tapped a finger on the jeep’s steering wheel, then glanced at his watch. “We should go,” he said without pressing her further.

  WT Sampson looked like a typical elementary school. Colorful pennants lined the walls, announcing the place “Home of the Sharks.” There were
debate team flyers, and a sign-up sheet for a new production of Alice in Wonderland. A large mural paid homage to Rear Admiral Sampson, the man who won control of Cuba in the Spanish-American War. But unlike other American schools, WT Sampson was in Communist territory.

  “This is where you rehearse?” Renée asked, the tap of her heels echoing in the silent hallway.

  John nodded. “Not sure what we’ll do once it shuts down,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Haven’t had an evacuation since the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’62.”

  They stepped into the auditorium, which smelled faintly of pink bubblegum and chattering fifth graders. Rows of hard wooden chairs lined the center of the room. A stately portrait of President George H. W. Bush dominated one wall, and a flag mounted in the corner gave a disgruntled wave in the faint breeze.

  “Let’s meet the cast,” John said, guiding her on stage where a group of men practiced their lines.

  After the introductions, she and John took their seats to watch the rehearsal. The play centered on the death of Private Willie Santiago, a marine stationed on GTMO but desperate to get out. Santiago discovered that two of his fellow marines had illegally shot across the fence line into Cuban territory. He reported the infraction to the Naval Investigative Service, hoping to bargain his way off the base. He turned up dead.

  At trial, the two marines accused of his murder argued they were carrying out a “code red,” a hazing ritual meant to teach Santiago a lesson in loyalty. Code reds were illegal, but the order came from the very top—by none other than the base commander, Colonel Nathan Jessep.

  When Jessep walked on stage, the air crackled with his cocksure energy. “You can’t handle the truth,” he sneered at the defense attorney. Jessep would meet his downfall, but the two marines who carried out his order were also found guilty of conduct unbecoming.

  “What did you think?” John asked when the rehearsal was over.

  Her fingers traced the initials someone had carved into the arm of her chair. “Do you think Santiago did the right thing reporting that illegal shooting?”