Dancing in the Baron's Shadow (18 page)

SIXTEEN

A
coral sky stretched over the small yard. Raymond tried to orient himself, coming to terms with the reality of life at Fort Dimanche: once here, behind these walls, the sun never again actually rose or set.

The reeking bucket in Raymond's hands stung his eyes. As the new man in his cell, he had volunteered to take it outside, and no one had objected. No one cared about him, it seemed. They wanted to know how he got here in his cell, but that was the extent of their concern. When the guards announced he was to be executed with his brother on August twenty-seventh, as requested by Warden Oscar, no one flinched. It was as if they were zombified, lobotomized, even. Only one prisoner muttered a response, avoiding eye contact with him.

“At least you know when,” he said. “Not knowing is the worst part.”

His brother was close by, just two prisoners away.

He glanced over his shoulder, and when nobody was looking, tapped the shoulder of the man in front of him. Raymond pointed at his brother and made a sign, and the inmate understood what he wanted. Quickly, Raymond skipped ahead, slipping into his new spot and slumping low to blend back into the line, nearly spilling the contents of his bucket in the process. His heart racing, he took a few breaths. This was the only way, he told himself. He had to push his luck, further and further, so he repeated his maneuver until he finally stood behind his brother.

Nicolas tried to turn as soon as he realized Raymond was there.

“Easy,” Raymond said. “Don't turn around.”

“What are you doing here?” Nicolas hissed. “Why is that guard helping us?”

“We have a friend in common,” he whispered back. “I came to get you out of here.”

Nicolas chuckled silently. The idea was too absurd.

“I have a plan,” his brother whispered into his neck. “Trust me.”

“So you got yourself arrested?”

Raymond shifted the bucket to his other hand. The metal handle weighed heavily against his palm and bit into the callused flesh of his fingers.

“That reporter I saved in Cité Simone? Remember him?” Raymond murmured. “He's helping me. And we have a friend in here. An ally.”

Nicolas kept his eyes glued on his bucket as the two brothers stood side by side at the ditch. Raymond took in Nicolas's frail figure and his grayish skin.

“Are you okay?” he whispered.

Nicolas checked to make sure the guards weren't looking. “How the hell did you get here, really? Did they come for you?”

“Don't worry about that right now,” Raymond whispered. “Listen, Eve and Amélie are in the Dominican Republic. I put them on a boat myself. Now it's your turn. Come August twenty-seventh, we have a plan.”

Nicolas shook his head. Was Raymond delusional?

“Escape?” he hissed as the men finished dumping their buckets, the flies swarming gleefully. The ground began to burn his feet, but Nicolas ignored the pain. “Are you crazy?”

“Have some faith,” Raymond said as he shook his bucket and turned, gagging at the stench. “And yes, I may be a little crazy. I'm here, aren't I?”

Nicolas didn't seem to hear him and Raymond saw the darkness in his brother's eyes. It was only a matter of time until he lost all sense of himself, like the rest of these wretches around them. A guard strode forward, pointing his rifle.

“Break's over, get back inside.”

The men lined up quietly. As they marched back into the fortress, Raymond leaned in again.

“I'll contact you soon,” he whispered. “Keep your eyes and ears open. You'll see your family again. Trust me.” They came to their cells, where two guards were waiting, weapons in hand.

“I've never let you down before, have I?”

The brothers' eyes met once more before the cell doors shut.

SEVENTEEN

T
he men in Raymond's cell also kept a calendar on the wall. They used a heart-shaped stone picked up from the yard, etching lines into the cement. When the main calendar keeper died of a bladder infection, someone else took over, marking a new day each time he heard a distant humming. A small aircraft patrolled the skies around five thirty every morning. This was the prisoners' only clock: the whine of an engine at high altitude. Each time it passed, Raymond and Nicolas moved one day ever closer to August and their execution.

Raymond kept to himself and Nicolas didn't press him for further details. Elon rarely spoke a word to either of them, gave no sign of sympathy. The wait was excruciating for Raymond, and soon his nails were bitten to the quick. The reality of his situation frightened him, but just when he was about to give in to despair, just when he thought he'd made a terrible mistake in trusting Sauveur, something happened. It was July 10, and the heat was stifling.

The prisoners seemed to be asleep with their eyes open, but they perked up when they heard the key turning in the lock. Panicked, they scurried toward the shadows and clung to the walls.

“Taxi! You're coming with me!”

Raymond didn't wait to be told twice. He jumped to his feet and followed the silhouette down the black hall of the prison.
The young guard was walking quickly, his heels clicking against the hard tile. Raymond worried someone might find them there, ask why they were wandering through the fortress. Elon stopped and turned to Raymond, his hand twitching around the barrel of his rifle.

“You know Milot?” he asked.

“Yes, chief. I'm Raymond L'Eveillé, a taxi driver. I drove him out of Cité Simone—”

“Keep your voice down!”

The young guard looked around, making sure no one had seen or heard them. He looked into Raymond's eyes. “Don't call me chief,” he said. “There's only one chief here, and that's the chief supervisor. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir—”

“Quiet! I will confirm the plan with you when I can. It could be weeks.”

Someone was coming down the stairs. Elon grabbed his shoulder and rushed him back toward his cell. Raymond wanted to scream. They were so close to Nicolas. They couldn't turn around now! But he kept quiet as the voices drew near. His cell door shut in his face.

“What's going on out there?” Boss asked.

Nicolas shrugged and he closed his eyes, listening to Elon's voice rise in the hall, calling out to the other guards.

When Raymond heard a voice in the hallway a week later, he immediately recognized it as Elon's.

“Lights out!”

He heard footsteps and waited patiently. The inmates loosened the lightbulb from the socket in the few cells where they worked, and darkness engulfed the prison. Raymond pressed his back against the wall. He felt light-headed.

When the footsteps reached his cell door, Raymond heard keys jingle and then the familiar scratch of a key turning inside a lock. The door opened with a creak, and through the slit, Raymond
and the other prisoners who tilted their head at an angle saw Elon's head peering in.

“Taxi?”

Raymond sprang forward, his muscles twitching with excitement. “I'm here.”

“Step outside.”

Raymond looked back at the other inmates before stepping out into the hallway. He knew there were two or three prisoners who wondered what was happening, but most were just grateful that the guard's attention wasn't on them.

The lightbulb in the hallway flickered every five seconds. Raymond counted them off in his head, his bare toes curling against the hot concrete. He looked at Elon as the door shut behind him. The young man was visibly nervous.

“We don't have a lot of time,” Elon whispered. He motioned for Raymond to follow him. “Hurry.”

Raymond looked around. At the end of the empty hall, he saw a bright light under a door and he knew immediately this had to be the guards' quarters. He could make out chuckles and slams he knew could only come from a game of dominoes. He heard the clatter of bones as the guards shuffled them.

They approached the cell door. Elon waved his hand at Raymond, a gesture of impatience he took as an order to be quiet. Cell six was at the opposite end of the hall from cell two, where Raymond had been kept. They stopped at the door and Elon reached for the keys buried inside his pocket. No one was coming down the hall, but they had to be quick about it. Elon turned the key in the lock. Raymond heard movement inside and imagined the frail prisoners flattening themselves against the wall, panicked by this unexpected intrusion.

“Get in!” Elon said roughly. “You've been transferred.”

Raymond held his breath as the guard called for another prisoner.

“You're moving to a new cell,” he told the man. “Hurry up!”

When the door closed behind him, Raymond was pressed with questions. Who was he? Why was he changing cells?

“I don't know,” Raymond said. “I just do what I'm told.”

His eyes slowly readjusted to the darkness. Everything was the same: the smell, the squalor, the skeletal frames of men who'd been there too long, the skin sagging from their bones. An old man named Boss pressed him for information. He avoided answering any questions.

Finally, a hand reached out and grabbed him.

Nicolas pulled his brother down onto a mat and they grasped each other's arms, staring at each other in the dim light, afraid to say anything, but thankful for this small miracle of embracing, something they hadn't done enough when they were out in the world. Despite the lice running through his hair, the scabs and sores accruing over his body, and his hands layered with filth, Nicolas was, for a moment, at peace. They sat like that until the cell was quiet and most prisoners had fallen asleep.

“Why are you here? You could get yourself killed,” Nicolas whispered. He squeezed his brother's arm. “This is madness. I'm as good as dead.”

“You're my brother.”

They were silent again. Raymond glimpsed limbs in the shadows, legs and arms searching for space to stretch out. They reminded him of crabs tangled in a fisherman's basket.

Nicolas hung his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “When you came to the house and I yelled at you. I shouldn't have said what I did. I shouldn't have done a lot of things. That book, thinking I could change things. The way I treated you. I shouldn't have.”

Raymond shook his head. “All of that is past now.”

Nicolas cleared his throat. “What about Yvonne? And the children? How could you leave them?”

Raymond grew cold and lowered his head. “They're gone.”

“Gone?”

Nicolas's heart sank as Raymond repeated the word. “Gone. To Miami. They took a raft about two months ago. There's been no news of them since, so…”

“Oh, Raymond.” Nicolas sighed deeply and listened to Raymond
pronounce the words that had been hard for him to share with Eve and Sauveur. Nicolas listened and realized how difficult it must have been for Raymond to swallow this bread of shame. His wife and children had abandoned him.

“I failed them,” he whispered. “I couldn't do enough, so they left.”

“No,” Nicolas said, resting his hand on his brother's knee. “You did what you could. This is the world we live in. We're all churning water hoping to make butter.”

“We'll get out of here,” Raymond replied. “We'll get out of here and I will find them.”

He leaned closer to Nicolas and whispered the tale of his own arrest. Nicolas sat in silence, astonished. Raymond felt his brother twitch as he listened to his story.

“You're right. You are crazy.” Nicolas shook his head, marveling at his brother's courage. He never would have done it, put in the same position. “I'm so frightened. Jean-Jean is dead. He barely survived a week in here.”

“I'm sorry,” Raymond said after a pause. “But Jean-Jean turned us away when we went to him for help. And the fat one—”

“Georges?”

“Yes. He hid in his closet rather than talk to us. It was pathetic, Nicolas.”

Somewhere near them in the dark, a man murmured prayers.

“I can get us out of any scrape, just like the old days. Okay? We'll get out of this. But once we are out, we'll have to run, and run hard. I need you to be prepared for that. You know Cité Simone?”

Nicolas nodded, though he'd never been there himself. Cité Simone's reputation preceded it. A slum filled with peddlers, street vendors, prostitutes, pimps, charlatans, and swindlers.

“Any other part of Port-au-Prince will be too dangerous. La Saline and Croix des Bossales will already be swarming with Tonton Macoutes. We can hide in the shanties of Cité Simone until we get a chance to get out of Port-au-Prince.”

Nicolas leaned toward Raymond and asked, “But how do we get out?”

Raymond shook his head. “It's better if you don't know. We have people on our side.”

“It doesn't sound like the odds are very good.”

Raymond moved his lips closer to Nicolas's ear. “Either we die here or we die trying. I'm not going to let Duvalier or Oscar or any one of them kill us, you hear me?”

“What makes you think you can trust these mysterious people? If my friends, people with connections, turned tail and ran, how can these people possibly accomplish the impossible?”

“There is some good left in this world,” he said.

Someone screamed outside the cell door, down the hallway, and the shriek caromed off the walls. Raymond caught his breath and shifted away from Nicolas. More prisoners began to wake.

A crash shuddered through the cell. The prisoners froze, their skin blue black in the faint light. Then a white flash came through the tiny window. Lightning. And more thunder, as loud as if the storm was sitting right on the roof of Fort Dimanche. Then the rain began in earnest. The prisoners shouted in happiness at first, applauding the heavens and running to the small window to see if they could catch a glimpse, but only gusts of petrichor infiltrated the fortress.

Soon, the cell began to steam, and Raymond and Nicolas were soaked as if they'd plunged in a hot bath. Breathing became difficult, and Raymond tried to remain calm as his brother gasped for air. This torrent of rain was speaking to them, Raymond assured him. August was coming. Freedom was near. And Nicolas, in response, coughed the blood out of his lungs.