Another Sun (22 page)

“Teaching what?”

“English. A degree from Tufts University. So he got a job on the small campus. In time we got to be friends. Intelligent—he understood the situation with surprising acuity. Also very gentle.”

“Flower power.”

“Precisely.”

“How did he get arrested?”

“More riots—this time the cane cutters and the kids at the lycée. Windows got smashed and the administration—with the tacit support of the Communist party of Guadeloupe, their Uncle Tom lackeys—called in the riot police.”

“And more people got killed, I suppose?”

He shook his head. “Then Dupont disappeared. Vanished.”

“Where to?”

“Ten days later, he re-emerged. His face covered with bruises. A black eye and his hair had been shaved off, down to the scalp. Jerry was no longer a hippy—he looked more like a convict who’d been thrown to the sharks off Devil’s Island. Another French specialty, as no doubt Hégésippe Bray could’ve told you.”

“Where had Dupont been?”

“In police detention.”

“Scarcely likely, Monsieur Carreaux.” Anne Marie shook her head. “Police detention for more than a week? Without a formal accusation? That’s not possible.”

He laughed. “We’re not talking about France. We’re talking about a colony.”

“The Republic doesn’t make up the law as it goes along.”

Philippe Carreaux lowered his voice. “Jerry came to see me. At that time I was sharing a flat in the university—a small, stuffy room that smelled of blocked drains—with several million cockroaches.”

“Where did Dupont live?”

“In one of the new blocks of flats that were being built at that time. One of the new estates. I think it was Cité Mortenol.”

“That’s where I live.”

“Where they’ve rehoused people who used to live in shacks?” He raised an eyebrow. “A working-class area for a juge d’instruction—for a white juge d’instruction.”

“You don’t think distinguishing between social classes is a form of racism?”

Carreaux laughed. “A Marxist juge d’instruction?”

Anne Marie went on. “What did Dupont tell you?”

“They’d kept his passport at the gendarmerie, and Jerry was terrified. He had a desperate need to talk to somebody willing to listen, and so I listened. I made some coffee and got him to sit down—but he was very agitated. His hands shook—he spilled half the coffee.”

“Why was he so worried?”

“They wanted him to be an informer. The gendarmes had confiscated his personal belongings—including several grams of marijuana. Told him he could have everything back—provided he infiltrated the anti-colonialist movement among the students and staff at the university.” The corners of Carreaux’s mouth turned upward. “In those days, the university had the reputation of being a center of political dissent. Renseignements Généraux told Jerry Dupont, either he worked for them.…”

“Or?”

“He’d be facing charges for the possession of drugs. And be deported.” He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard. “There was a drugs charge waiting for him in the US. The last thing Dupont wanted was deportation back to the United States.”

“He had sympathy for the revolutionaries?”

“Not revolutionaries, madame le juge. Anti-colonialists. And yes, I think he did have sympathy for us.”

“What did you advise him to do?”

The man in the blue overalls lit another cigarette. He raised the magazine he was reading—it was wrapped in brown paper—and placed it on the table.

“I tried to calm him down. The gendarmes had told him they wanted him to report back a few days later—the gendarmes acting under the orders of Renseignements Généraux.”

“He calmed down?”

“Jerry Dupont told me he would never go—that he’d rather kill himself.”

“But he went?”

“Because I accompanied him. I told him to act rationally. A new experience for me, seeing a white man getting this treatment from a colonial regime.” He smiled softly at the memory. “I went to the gendarmerie, and I waited outside, thinking he’d be out in a few minutes—a quarter of an hour at most.”

“And?”

“I spent more than five and a half hours waiting for him, just hanging around.”

“Dupont was released?”

“I went home.”

“Without waiting for him?”

“A lot later—around midnight, Jerry turned up at my place. I was in bed, and he banged on the door and woke me up. You can’t imagine how glad I was to see him, the poor bastard.”

“Hadn’t caused you to lose any sleep.”

“You’re very cynical, but in fact I hadn’t been sleeping—I’d been worrying. He came into the flat and I offered to make him a hot drink. Almost as much for myself as for him. Only this time Jerry needed something stronger—a lot stronger. I gave him rum, which he drank neat, one shot after another. As you can imagine, he got drunk very quickly.”

“And you?”

“Stuck to a tisane. Soon he went off to the lavatory. By this time I was pretty tired. There was nothing physically wrong with Jerry; the police hadn’t touched him—and at the time I was convinced it was an act.”

“An act?”

“He was overreacting.”

“So you kicked him out?”

“I let him drink. I thought he would calm down. I was relieved, you see. I’d been worried.”

“Did he calm down?”

“Not exactly. He went to.…”

“Yes?”

“He went to piss, and when he didn’t reappear from the lavatory, I went looking for him. Found him sitting on the lavatory seat, his trousers round his ankles and blood all over the tiled floor. He’d taken my razor, the stupid bastard, and had tried to slit his wrist.”

Anne Marie said, “Messy.”

“Less serious than it looked at first. People say I’m a hard man—and perhaps I am. But I abhor violence. I detest unnecessary suffering.” He shrugged. “That night Jerry slept on my bed, and I slept on the floor.”

“Good of you.”

He looked at Anne Marie. “Not much else I could do for a fellow human being who’d fallen into the hands of the colonialists. The following morning I gave him a good breakfast. I got the impression he’d cheered up.”

“And Jerry Dupont went back to teaching?”

“No.”

As the technician turned the page of his magazine, Anne Marie recognized the soft colors of pornographic photography. The look on the man’s face was of deep concentration. The tip of his tongue was visible between his lips.

“It was Whitsun and I had to visit my parents in Marie Galante. I invited Jerry to come with me. The trip would’ve done him a world of good. But he refused. Said Renseignements Généraux had forbidden him to leave Pointe-à-Pitre.”

“When did you next see him?”

“I didn’t, madame le juge.”

Carreaux’s eyes were cold. “Jerry didn’t come into the university the following week. Or ever again. We all assumed he’d been arrested. The atmosphere was tense. Riot police and armored cars patrolling the streets of the city. I’d once visited him in Cité Mortenol and so I went back looking for him. I went with a colleague—a man called Auguste. We knocked on Jerry’s door, but there was no reply. The neighbors said they hadn’t seen him for several days and so we left. What else could we do?”

“The police had arrested him?”

“The newspapers and the radio tried to hush everything up, but they couldn’t stop people from talking. The neighbor—the same woman that Auguste and I had spoken with—had noticed a smell and it got worse as the days went past—it was the beginning of June when the temperatures are up in the thirties. Then she was plagued with flies. She spring-cleaned her house—but the flies wouldn’t go away.”

“She alerted the police?”

“Not something my compatriots like doing. But the smell got a lot worse—and finally she felt she must contact the police. When those gentlemen felt they could spare a moment from beating natives and firing at the cane workers on strike, they sent round a patrol. An officer tried to knock the door down.”

“You were there?”

“No, madame le juge.” Carreaux shook his head. “When the officer couldn’t get through the front door, he went through the neighbor’s apartment and climbed in over the balcony.”

“And?”

“Hanging from the ceiling. That’s how he found Jerry Dupont.” Philippe Carreaux smiled grimly. “Dead and in an advanced state of putrefaction.”

“He wasn’t murdered?”

“Of course he was murdered. Renseignements Généraux were as guilty as if they’d put the noose round Dupont’s neck. The poor bastard—he’d managed to live twenty-three years of his life, and it was in Guadeloupe—in a strange country and at the hands of the forces of reaction——that he had to die. Like a tracked animal.”

The technician put the magazine away, stood up and went to the glass door to stare out at the marina and the falling rain.

“What did you do, Monsieur Carreaux?”

“We held a meeting of the university staff. A lot of us were shocked, but of course, the university was controlled by the Communists who were playing the game of the colonialists. Time of political tension, they said—it wouldn’t do any good to drag Jerry Dupont’s death into the political arena. The real problem”—Philippe Carreaux snorted angrily—“was the cane cutters’ wages. They’re all the same, the Communists. They love to maintain they’re patriots—but their well-disciplined hearts all belong to Moscow—and to the soul of Joseph Stalin.”

“You let the matter drop?”

“Jerry Dupont had given Auguste an address in New York, and I wrote to his parents personally. They never replied.”

Silence.

Carreaux said, “Auguste was from Bordeaux. He had his
agrégation
, and there was a good university career in front of him. Auguste was teaching in the West Indies instead of doing his military service. A Frenchman—but he had a certain amount of
human decency. He was badly shaken by Dupont’s death. He wrote a couple of letters—one to the Ministry of Education, another to the Ministry of Defense, who was his employer at the time. Felt he couldn’t let Jerry Dupont die just like that, murdered and forgotten. Auguste despised the Communists even more than we patriots did. Then one day he was contacted. He was a Freemason, Auguste—all those secret signs and small aprons and grown men playing like silly children—and it was at a meeting he was given the message. By nobody less important, less influential that the Préfet’s first secretary.”

“What message?”

“To let the matter drop.”

“Why?”

“There was more to Jerry Dupont’s death than met the eye. Let the matter drop, he was told, or on returning to France, at the end of his service, instead of teaching at the University of Bordeaux, he would be finding himself teaching in some godforsaken lycée lost in the Massif Central.”

Modernization had not reached the third story of the Chamber of Commerce.

There was a floor of rubberized linoleum and the walls that had once been whitewashed were streaked with dirt and the passage of time. Anne Marie walked down the corridor and stopped a moment to stare out across the roofs of Basse-Terre. The small, colonial town nestled against the side of the Souffrière. A bright sun and a cloudless sky had transformed the Caribbean Sea into a Mediterranean blue.

ARCHIVES
.

Anne Marie knocked and then pushed the door open. The hinges screeched unpleasantly.

A man stood directly in front of her. He appeared surprised. “Can I help you?” Several of his teeth were a grey metal.

“
La Coloniale
.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have the volumes for 1940?”

“Two volumes per year.” He looked at Anne Marie carefully. Behind the glasses, the red edges of his eyelids were humid. “I suppose you’re another of these students.”

“Le juge Laveaud. I’m from the Ministry of Justice. I’ve just
driven down from the university library in Pointe-à-Pitre. The chief librarian told me to contact Madame Cléopatre.”

“Madame Cléopatre.” An unpleasant laugh. “She’s on maternity leave. Perhaps I can help you.” His voice was not enthusiastic.

“I need
La Coloniale
for 1940.”

He nodded, put down the pair of scissors he had been holding and approached the main bookcase. “Of course,” he said. “What year?”

“1940—April and May.”

Crouching down on his spindly legs—he was wearing shorts and a pair of battered sandals—the man ran a finger along the faded volumes. “1940, first semester.” He muttered to himself. “Then here you are.” He added, “They don’t want to put in the conditioning because they want to do away with us.”

“Us?”

“Microfilm—that’s what they want. They say it’s cheaper—but I don’t see how it can be.” He hauled the book up onto the wooden counter. “All that film—it must cost a lot of money. But they go quite wild over anything they think is modern.” He shook his head, “Guadeloupe’s not America, you know.”

She took the book. “I want the volume for 1940—this is 1932.”

The spindly man held the book in both hands, turned it and studied the gold script. “You’re right, you know.” He tut-tutted. “What year do you want?”

“1940.”

“1940, you say? Bizarre.”

“What?”

“I beg your pardon, madame.”

She ducked under the hinge counter and crouched down beside the old man who was looking along the lower shelf. The dull eyes glanced at her with disapproval. His pink lips were wet. “Who are you?”

“1940, please.”

“Precisely what I’m looking for.” He sounded offended. “You’re
all the same. You come barging in here—you think you own the place—you and all the friends of Madame Cléopatre. She’s not the Préfet, you know. She’s not even God Almighty, whatever she may claim to the contrary. If she thinks she can boss me about, she’s got another think coming.” He added, “She’s not going to force me into retirement.”

The volumes of
La Coloniale
were out of order. The 1940 edition was wedged between the 1974 handbook to South Africa and a moth-eaten copy of the Caracas telephone directory.

“This is what I’m looking for.”

The archivist said spitefully, “Then you’ve found it, haven’t you?”

Anne Marie took the bound volume and sat down at a desk at the far end of the dusty reading room. For a while the man peered at her in angry silence, then he returned to his scissors, his spineless books, and the glue-pot.