Wolf Mountain, page 3
“Bless you,” Asher said. “Are you a flight attendant?”
“No,” the old man laughed, “I’m a Roman Catholic priest.”
Asher found himself sitting next to two college students. They were on their way to do missionary work. After talking to them for twenty minutes, Asher realized that he was searching for something cynical to write about them. He couldn’t find anything. They were both good kids. The boy was in a fraternity and the girl was in a sorority. They were both Episcopalians from Florida who’d been doing missionary trips to Latin America all their lives. They built houses, distributed food, dug wells, dispensed medicine, etc. Asher had never done anything like that when he was a kid—or even when he was an adult!
The route they took led them over most of the Bahamas. The kids interrupted stories of college life to look out the window and see the sights. At last the island of Hispaniola—the body of land that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic—appeared below. They were afforded a view of the entire country. As they passed over the north of the country, Asher pointed out an enormous cruise ship in the port of Labadee—a walled-off peninsula owned by a cruise ship company and operated as a private resort. Supposedly, it was the biggest money-making venture in the Haiti.
The middle of the country was fairly empty of population—just mountains that couldn’t really be appreciated from such a distance. At last, came Port-au-Prince. The three of them craned eagerly over for their first glimpse of the city. They couldn’t see much. As the plane banked and their window pointed directly at the ground, Asher could only make out stacks of containers by the port.
The country of Haiti is shaped roughly like a U lying on its side. The prongs of the “U”—the northern and southern peninsulas—point due west. In the cup of that U—right where the southern peninsula meets the mainland—lies Port-au-Prince. The surrounding land masses have historically made it an excellent natural harbor.
At last they landed. As Asher looked out the window he got his first sense that there was something off about Haiti. An airplane had been left to rot by the side of the runway. This was not a little Cessna—this was a full Boeing 727 passenger jet. It was branded with the logo of some local Caribbean airline that Asher had never heard of. The front door was ripped off and the plane sat there in the field, alone and rusting.
They quickly pulled up to the gate of Toussaint Louverture International Airport. Truth be told, the airport was actually in much better condition than Asher had expected. It was no worse than many airports in the tropics that he’d been to. This one was a step up from the one in Key West.
There was a real jetway—Asher had expected an old-fashioned stairway leading down from the plane. The jetway emerged into a long clean hallway. The hallway seemed to be a recent addition to an older, crumbling airport next to it. Asher couldn’t tell if this was because of the earthquake or just general decay.
As he walked along, snapping pictures, the sound of drums filled the corridor. An escalator led him to the ground floor where a group of smiling musicians in matching pristine uniforms played Zouk music. See?Their smiling faces seemed to urge. We are just like any other tropical paradise.
He stepped outside into the hot, late-afternoon sunlight. Instantly, a surge of adrenaline shot through him. He stood on the tarmac and took a deep breath of tropical air. In the distance were the mountains like a great green wall. His regular life seemed a million miles and a million years away.
A bus picked them up and drove them to the main building to go through customs and immigration. They queued up outside in the heat on a line that seemed to move not at all. This didn’t bother Asher; it’s an old cliché that the best gauge of any country’s government was the efficiency of its airports. Considering Haiti’s status as a “failed republic,” Asher had no illusions about going anywhere quickly.
Zach, one of the college students, asked: “So what’s your story going to be about?”
Asher thought about lying for a second, then said, “It’s about werewolves.” He had to laugh at himself because it sounded so silly spoken aloud. The two kids looked at him as if he were joking. “No, I’m serious. Somebody got lynched for being a werewolf in one of the tent cities.”
The two kids looked at each other. “Really?”
“Yup. I’ve been doing some research and Haiti has a traditional belief in werewolves.”
“So you think there are really werewolves here?”
Asher smiled. “No. I think that, when they are confronted by someone unimaginably evil, some people choose to believe that person must be some sort of supernatural monster, like a werewolf.”
Up ahead, a sweating security guard slowly ushered people in one at a time. Many in the queue wore IDs from various NGOs.
At last they were inside. Asher got his passport stamped, feeling a twitch of pride at seeing the word “Haiti” there. Once inside, the baggage claim area was considerably more shabby. On the dirty wall to his right was a piece of green masking tape with the word “TOURISME”written in black magic marker. Immediately beneath it was a red piece of tape with the word “INFORMATION” written in the same hand. Asher smiled at the ungrammatical use of Frenglish. Beneath the sign, sitting at a folding card table, was a dejected Haitian woman. Apparently, she was the entire tourist information department at the airport.
She didn’t have a single customer.
Who would she have? Everyone there was either a returning Haitian, a missionary worker, or a worker for an NGO. As Graham Greene had observed, the country was no longer a tourist destination.
The billboards at the airport did their best to convince otherwise. Everywhere he looked, the same picture of a beautiful, smiling young Haitian couple lying on a white sand beach stared back at him. They both wore snorkeling gear. Written in the sand in front of them was the slogan: “Welcome to Haiti!”
Asher collected his suitcase and said goodbye to his young missionary friends. He headed to the exit where he found an older man holding a sign with his name on it.
“I am Mr. Greene.”
“Hello, I’m Ben from the hotel.” They shook hands. “May I take your bag?”
“No thanks, I’ve got it.”
As soon as he stepped out into the sunlight, it was obvious that something was going on. There was a huge crowd of people gathered outside the airport gates waiting for someone to arrive. They stood on the other side of the fence from him and were looking at the airport expectantly. Asher turned to Ben. “Who are they waiting for?”
“He just landed.”
Asher thought he must be referring to some celebrity on a goodwill mission. Maybe Wycleff Jean come back home. “Who?”
“Duvalier.”
Asher stopped in his tracks and grabbed Ben by the shoulder. “Baby Doc has returned to Haiti?”
Ben seemed confused about why he should care so much. “Yes. He’s coming out right now.”
Asher spun around in a panic. There was remarkably little security here and he was standing inside the secured area. Fate had placed him right in the middle of a big story. And, as far as he could see, he was the only one. There were no other journalists inside the gates of the airport.
“Shit!” He turned back to Ben. “You have to help me.” It was obvious from his tone that he was deadly serious. He handed Ben his digital Cannon camera. It was not only good for still pictures but took excellent movies as well. Asher knelt and rooted through his backpack. At last he dug out his portable digital recorder and his press badge that read:“Newark Star-Ledger.” What good that would do him here, he had no idea.
Asher looked over his shoulder. A black sedan, flanked by bodyguards, sat parked near a private door not twenty yards from him. The door opened.
“Shit.” Asher stood up and grabbed the camera from Ben. He set it to “FILM” and hit the record button then handed it back to Ben. “Here.” His voice was deadly serious. “You are going to film me interviewing Duvalier.”
A look of horror crossed Ben’s face. “Mr. Greene—I can’t.”
“Sure you can. Don’t touch any of the buttons.” He pointed at the screen. “Look at this andbe sure you see me and him at all times. Don’t stop filming no matter what happens. Understand?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. “But—”
“Even if his security guards shoot me in the face, film it! Understand?”
Ben nodded.
“Great.” Asher grabbed Ben by the shirt and dragged him over. As he did so, he saw an older man in a dark suit—obviously the former dictator—emerge from the airport and head for the car. Asher took off almost at a run, dragging poor old Ben behind him.
He stopped when one of the guards stuck a machine gun in his face, shouting something Asher did not understand.
Asher waved his badge. “I’m an American journalist.”
The guard shouted something back. Whatever it was in Creole, it sure wasn’t an invitation to tea. It didn’t matter—Duvalier was now only a few feet away.
“Monsieur Duvalier,” Asher shouted, holding up his press badge. “Asher Greene of theNewark Star-Ledger.” He paused and then added. “I’m an American.” That seemed to get his attention. “Why did you choose now to return to Haiti?”
Incredibly, Duvalier stopped and listened to him. “I have returned to help my people in their time of need.” He looked considerably older and thinner than Asher remembered. In his heyday in the seventies, he’d been enormously fat; a bloated leach sucking on the life’s blood of his people. Ever since then, he’d been living in exile in Paris; merely well-to-do instead of obscenely wealthy. Over the years, his trophy wife had left him and he’d been living on diminishing resources.
Asher asked a follow-up: “Won’t it appear though that you’ve returned to try to free the millions of dollars you have in frozen assets in Haiti?”
This time he didn’t respond. A brief look of hatred crossed his face and then he stepped into the car.
Asher whipped around to Ben, who had begun to lower the camera. Asher grabbed him by the wrist and made him raise it to Asher’s face. He spoke into the microphone. “No comment from former Haitian president-for-life, Jean-Claude Duvalier. In his own words, he is only here to help his people. In the eyes of the international community, his motives are much more suspect. This is Asher Greene for theNewark Star-Ledger.”
After waiting a beat, Asher grabbed the camera back from Ben. Then, he did something that completely perplexed the old man—he hugged him. “Thanks! You’re a life-saver. Here.” He slapped a twenty-dollar-bill into his hand. “Thanks for your troubles.”
Ben looked down at the money and then back at Asher. “Mr. Greene...do you want to go to the hotel or not?”
Asher laughed. “Yes. Please.”
“Good.” Ben looked around. “It’s dark now. Not safe.”
Ben led him over to the car. Asher kept filming the crowd for use as B-roll. At last they climbed into a big white van bearing the name of the hotel and took off toward Port-au-Prince.
Asher switched on his cell phone. Surprisingly, he had full bars. “You have good service here,” he said.
Ben nodded. “The best. It’s only a few years old.”
“Would you excuse me for a moment while I call my boss?”
Asher punched up Simmons’s number. It was Sunday evening, so he was probably home with his family, finishing up dinner, watching the game.
“Hey!” Simmons laughed as he answered. “It’s too bad you’re not in Haiti. I just saw on the news that Baby Doc has come back. Nobody knew about it—not even Obama—until he was almost there.”
“I am in Haiti.”
“You’rewhere? What the hell are you doing down there? I told you not to go.”
“You’re not my mother. And, like you said, I need a vacation.”
“People don’t go to Haiti for a vacation.”
“Well, the posters at the airport beg to differ.”
Asher heard Simmons sigh deeply, expressing his disapproval over the miles. “Well, have you heard anything about Duvalier?”
“Yes.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I just interviewed him.”
There was silence for a moment and then Simmons said: “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not. I got it all on video. I even got a good sound bite. And it gets better—I was the only journalist there. It’s an exclusive. The Newark Star-Ledger potentially just scooped the rest of the world.”
“That’s...wait. What do you mean, ‘potentially’?”
“Well, if you remember, you didn’t authorize this trip. I’m down here on my own dime on an unrelated story.”
“Sonofabitch.” Asher held the phone away from his ear. Yes, reception was excellent in this country. “Are you blackmailing me?”
“No. I’m just stating that, if I’m going to submit this story, I’m going to need additional monies.”
“How soon can you get me that film?”
Asher held the phone away from his mouth and turned to Ben, who was driving through the pitch-blackness of Port-au-Prince. “How long is it to the hotel?”
“A half-hour.”
Asher spoke into the phone. “I can have it to you in forty-five minutes.”
“What hotel are you staying at?”
“The Oloffson.”
Simmons laughed. “You don’t fool around, do you?” All right, I’m heading to the office right now. I want a story and a video waiting for me when I get there.”
Click.
Asher switched his cell phone over to its recording app and began dictating his story to himself. The drive was incredibly bumpy and, so far, Asher hadn’t paid the least attention to his first drive through the city. It didn’t matter. It was too dark to see anything. There were no lights on.
They drove through a street of crumbling concrete buildings and arrived at an immense stone wall. The grey edifice was at least nine feet tall and extended as far as Asher could see. It looked like it was built to withstand mortar fire. At the corner, the wall was completed by a heavy wrought-iron gate. Two muscular sentries guarded it. They wore matching khaki outfits and clutched AK-47 rifles across their chests, faces betraying no sense of humor. This was the entrance to the Hotel Oloffson.
Ben waved at the guards. One of them activated the gate, which slowly swung open.
“Wow,” Asher said, “some security.”
“Every hotel in Port-au-Prince has become a fortress since the earthquake. They all have armed guards. They have to. Things are too dangerous. But it’s safe here. No one can get in.”
Once they were through the gate, they drove up the beautiful garden path of the Hotel Oloffson. Simmons had been right to scoff. The Oloffson was one of the most famous hotels in the world. Charles Adams had been a frequent guest and it was the inspiration for the house inThe Addams Family. Graham Greene—a personal hero of Asher’s—had set his novel,The Comedians, here.
As they pulled up the drive, the well-lighted hotel emerged from between the palm trees. It was a white gingerbread building, well over a hundred years old. It had remained undamaged from the earthquake—apparently, they knew how to build them back then. The much newer luxury hotel, Montana, had collapsed.
Ben parked in front of the entrance staircase. The hotel loomed over them through the palm trees—beautiful towers and balconies brightly lit at night. This was another world here—another world from home and another world from the rest of Haiti. Asher carried his own suitcase up the front stair (he didn’t want to make old Ben lug his stuff). At the top, he found himself in the wrap-around veranda that served as the hotel’s dining room. At the three occupied tables, elegant guests enjoyed what looked like excellent dinners. For a moment, Asher could believe that he was at one of those old plantations-cum-inns that are so popular on St. Kitts and Nevis.
They crossed the antique wooden lobby to the front desk. Across from the desk, in a glass case, was a large scale replica of the hotel. Looking at the dollhouse model, Asher could appreciate the scale of the onetime mansion in all of its gingerbread colonial magnificence.
Ben rang the bell. “Magda,” he said. A pretty, young Haitian girl appeared, wearing a white shirt embossed with the logo of the hotel. “Guest.”
Magda grinned at Asher. “You are Monsieur Greene?”
Asher smiled back. “Yes.”
“We’ve been expecting you. The John Barrymore suite is all ready.”
“There must be some mistake. I didn’t request a suite.”
“I know.” Magda consulted a pad in front of her. “We just received a phone call from a Monsieur Simmons. He asked that you be given a suite and that he should pay for it.”
“How nice.”
The John Barrymore suite was more than nice—it was grand. It was one of the balconied rooms upstairs. The outdoor balcony came equipped with a four-poster bed—presumably for the prerequisite afternoon naps. Asher had no time to appreciate the opulence of his room however. He immediately fired up his computer and wrote his story. He emailed that (thank goodness for wifi!) along with the video of the interview to Simmons.
He spent the rest of the evening on the phone with Simmons thanking him for the room and going over editorial changes to the story. He also insisted that Ben get a photo credit for the shoot—probably throw him some money as well.
After he got off the phone with Simmons, he called the front desk. Magda answered. “Yes,” Asher said. “I’m going to need a car and a guide tomorrow morning and for the rest of my stay here. Someone who speaks English, French, and Creole.”
Magda said that she would set him up with a very reliable man they’d worked with in the past.
At last, Asher stripped off his clothes and climbed into his enormous bed.
Sometime during the night, he was awakened by a violent tropical storm. Oh great,Asher thought, this will make traipsing around Haiti fun.
There are no storms like tropical storms. Asher was shocked at the violence of the rain batting against the windows. Eventually, he drifted back to sleep, listening to the wind howl through the eaves.
