Peacekeeping Read online

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  In memory of my mother, Toby Saks (1942–2013)

  Degagé pa peché.

  Getting by isn’t a sin.

  —CREOLE PROVERB

  What you have to understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation is not fair. For my part, I have almost two decades’ experience conducting interrogations such as this one each and every day; most of the time, the suspect has never before been interrogated. I am certified in the Reid technique, both Level One and the Advanced Course; the suspect has not flown to Charlotte for the five-day seminar at the Airport Marriott in Advanced Tactics of Criminal Evasion. He does not know the rules in the way I do. He has come to my territory, my office, at the moment of my choosing. I am dressed in a suit and tie. I have my diplomas on the wall, and the shoulder holster of my firearm is visible. I have drunk my coffee, moved my bowels, taken a shower. I am not in a fine sweat and my heart is not beating like a bongo. And of course, the stakes are so much higher for him than for me: should I make a mistake, a criminal will go free, but I will still go home to my wife. Should he make a mistake, he will go to prison. Under these conditions, the moment a suspect sits in my office, naturally he is nervous.

  That is always the first thing I say.

  “You seem nervous.” I try to say this with as much compassion as I can. “Is something bothering you?”

  I have had many suspects simply collapse at this point. Almost every criminal—indeed, almost everyone, innocent or guilty—has an urge to confess; later, they will wonder why they didn’t just stay quiet. Nobody who works in criminal justice doubts that we are born with sin on our hands.

  “We need to clear a few things up,” I say. “The sooner we clear things up, the sooner this will be over.”

  Now I’m required by law to add, “You don’t need to stay here and talk to me. You can leave at any time, but I’d very much appreciate your assistance in getting this settled out, so you can get back to your business. You can also have a lawyer with you here if you like. Do you understand?”

  In fifteen years, only a handful of suspects have availed themselves of their legal opportunity to stand up and walk out of my office. Only a handful. One was a seventeen-year-old boy named Antwan. He was accused of stealing a Corvette. The victim was the suspect’s neighbor, and the victim was sure that Antwan was the culprit. The boy had apparently ogled the car just a little too long. The car was found smashed up in the bottom of a ravine a few days later.

  Antwan said, “I don’t got to be here, I’m out of here.”

  “That’s no problem,” I said. “We’ve got your endotriglyceride levels from that doorknob you’re touching. We’ll match those up against the steering wheel, and that’ll tell us the whole story right there.”

  Antwan pulled down the sleeve of his hoodie and began wiping at the doorknob.

  I said, “Son, why on earth wouldn’t you want us to match up those endotriglyceride levels if you’re not involved in this? If you’re afraid of what those endotriglyceride levels will tell me, you should sit right back down. If the truth comes out later and you been wasting my time, I won’t be able to help you.”

  I was right. It was the moment. The endotriglyceride levels never lie. Antwan sat back down.

  Then I tell the suspect that he is guilty. Full stop. He is guilty, and I know he is guilty. I tell him all the evidence we have against him, piling it up layer after layer until he feels entombed by his misdeeds, until the suspect is well-nigh positive he cannot escape. If I do not have solid evidence, I invent it.

  Sometimes I will tell the suspect that he was caught on a hidden surveillance camera.

  Sometimes I will tell him that we have an eyewitness against him.

  Once, I told a suspect that Madame Roccaforte, a very well known psychic here in Watsonville County, had given me his name. She had seen him burning in a lake of fire.

  The suspect will start to open his mouth, and I shush him quick. If he were to speak, we might start to argue. An interrogation is not a debate. Once he says, “I didn’t do it!” it’s that much easier to stare me in the eye and say it a second time. Or he might ask for a lawyer. So I say, “Now is the time for me to talk. Your time to talk will come later. For now, you just listen to me.”

  I do not want information from the suspect: I want a confession.

  I say, “Antwan, all your friends tell me you’re a pretty good kid, do all right in school, respect your mamma.”

  “Yes sir.”

  But his voice is wavering, and he doesn’t make eye contact. He is biting his lip. He is staring at my Florsheims.

  “But Antwan, I know you stole that vehicle. There is no doubt in my mind. Even if I didn’t have the endotriglyceride levels to back me up in a court of law, I can see it right in your eyes. So we need to work together on this.”

  I let this sink in. And here, so much depends on my professionalism.

  “Let me tell you what I know. They say you had that new job down at Arby’s after school. They say you were even giving some money to your mom. That’s good. They say you were running late all the time, having to take the bus down there every day, I could see that. And I know Lou Wendell. Oh boy!”

  All of this has come out of my pre-interrogation interviews. Lou Wendell is the manager over at Arby’s. You don’t manage a successful franchise like Arby’s for eight years without being a prick. Antwan nods up and down slowly, but his foot is jiggling, up-down-left-right, over and over again.

  “If it was something like that—you taking that car because you were running late, thinking you’d lose your job, and getting in an accident—I think everyone understands, a good kid like you making a mistake. On the other hand, if it was just that you wanted to go for a joyride, well, that’s another thing. Just take a man’s car, drive it around for pleasure, ditch it in a gulley…”

  I shake my head once or twice.

  “You see, Antwan, the law makes a distinction between what we call crimes of necessity and crimes of malice, between what we need to do and what we just do because we feel like it. So if you were feeling rushed that afternoon because you can’t afford to lose that job, and the keys were right there, and you thought you’d get that car back to him before he even notices it’s gone, and you needed that vehicle—that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

  Now Antwan is bobbing his head more than slightly, if I’m telling the story right. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He doesn’t know that I’ve given him the choice between two stories. In one story, he can hold his head upright; in the other, he must live with his shame. Innocence is never an option.

  You and the girl were just messing around; she was doing all sorts of crazy things; things just got out of control; you’re not the kind of man to hurt a woman. Or: you are a predator. Violent. A threat to society.

  A newborn baby in the house? Family comes before anything else. Who can blame a man for looking out for his own? Or: you kit
ed those checks to buy meth, smoked the dope in your own house in front of your own baby.

  Which would you choose?

  Now Antwan might say, “I’ve never done something wrong before, you can ask—”

  And I’ll say, “See? That’s good. That’s real good. We can work with that. That shows this here was a misjudgment. That matters. I know what happened. I know this was an error in judgment, owing to the stress.”

  Antwan will be silent a long time. Maybe there are tears in his eyes.

  All he wants is for this moment to be over.

  So I say, “Antwan, my wife and I been planning a trip to the Keys since last November. We’re supposed to be leaving tomorrow. I disappoint my wife and tell her our trip is over because I have to stay here working this case, getting you to tell me the truth that we both know about that car, waiting for your endotriglycerides to come back from the lab—believe you me, when I have to talk to the district attorney, you will feel my wife’s pain. She’s been dieting three weeks now, feeding me nothing but carrots. The first thing that district attorney is going to ask me when we decide how to proceed is whether you were a man. If I tell him how things really went down, about your error in judgment, about your stress—Christ alive, we all were young once. I can help you. But I need to know from you, right now, what happened.”

  I look at him a long time, not blinking. The very second he looks away, I say, “Now tell me all about it.”

  Most times it’s just as easy as that.

  Sometimes the crime is of greater gravity—a murder or a rape. These confessions, contrary to expectations, are often easier to produce, despite the greater punishment the criminal will incur. For in these cases the criminal’s tension is also that much greater, as is his desire to tell his side of the story. He has been telling himself the story of his crime since the moment he pulled the trigger. This is certain: he has done nothing else but think about his crime. He wants to talk about the most significant thing he has done in his life. A car thief, a vandal, a petty drug dealer will not always understand the gravity of his situation, the consequences of his actions. It will not seem serious to him. Never so a murderer.

  Immediately after the confession—and this is a moment of very great intimacy between myself and the suspect—the suspect will almost always offer a second justification of his crimes, an honest justification. It will come out as an afterthought. This is something he wants me to hear, and no matter what he says, it will remain between us. I already have what the law requires. Sometimes the justification is as simple as “I was bored and wanted to go for a ride,” and sometimes as heartbreaking as “I needed the money to buy my daddy’s heart medicine.”

  No matter what the crime, I always say, “I understand.”

  That’s what I hope you’ll say too.

  PART ONE

  1

  There wasn’t much to the town, really—a triangular spit of land between a river and the sea, and shaped like the bowl of a natural amphitheater, most every street sloping down sooner or later to the azure stage of the Caribbean or guttering out inconclusively into twisting warrens of dirt paths, the houses degenerating to huts, then hovels. In the city center, old wooden houses listed at improbable angles. Energetic, prosperous people had built these houses and carefully painted them, but the salt air had long ago stripped away the color, leaving them a uniform grayish brown. There was a small town square, the Place Dumas, around which a flock of motorcycle taxi drivers circumnavigated in the course of every sunny day, maneuvering always to stay in the shade, and a filthy market where the marchandes hacked up and sold goat cadavers under a nimbus of flies. On the Grand Rue, merchants in old-fashioned shophouses with imposing wrought iron balconies sold sacks of cement or PVC pipes, or bought coffee. Jérémie had more coffin makers than restaurants. There were fewer cars on the streets than donkeys. The Hotel Patience down on the Grand Rue was said to be a bordello; word was that the ladies of the night were fat. Several little shops, all identical, featured row upon row of gallon-size vats of mayonnaise, which fact I could not reconcile with the lack of ready refrigeration, and bottles of Night Train and Manischewitz—local belief held the latter was a powerful aphrodisiac. You could buy cans of Dole Tropical Fruit mix, but you could not obtain a fresh vegetable; Jérémie was on the sea, but fresh fish was a rarity.

  At midday, the dogs lay in the dusty streets panting, which is more or less what they did evening, morning, and night also, except when they copulated.

  Whole days would pass discussing when the big boat from Port-au-Prince would arrive, staring out at the multicolored sea to register its earliest presence. The boat’s arrival brought a momentary flurry of excitement as the cargo was unloaded and barefoot men, muscles straining, eyeballs bulging, dragged thousand-pound chariots of rice, Coca-Cola, or cement through the dusty streets.

  My wife and I lived in a tumbledown gingerbread, at least a century old and shaded by a quartet of sprawling mango trees. It was one of the most beautiful houses in all of Haiti. A cool terrace ran around the house, where we ate our meals and dozed away the hot afternoons in the shade. In the evenings it was (mildly) exciting to sit outside in the rocking chair and watch thick purple strokes of lightning light up cloud mountains out over the Îles Cayemites. It was the kind of house in which one might have found behind the acajou armoire a map indicating the location in the untended garden of hidden treasure.

  The windows of the house had no glass, just hurricane shutters, and very late at night I sometimes heard coming up from Basse-Ville the manic beating of drums and women’s voices singing spooky songs with no melody. This was the only time Jérémie really came alive. My whole body would grow tense as I strained to hear more clearly this strange music, which would endure all through the night and well into sunrise. I had never before heard music like that. It was the music of a people laboring to communicate with unseen forces; it was the music of a people dancing wildly around a fire until seized up by some mighty unknown thing.

  Only in these midnight dances would the languid tenor of the town change, revealing its frantic, urgent heart.

  * * *

  Our chef d’administration was a Trinidadian named Slim. His Sunday barbecues were animated by his personal vision of the United Nations as a brotherhood of man—Asian, African, and Occidental all seated together at plastic tables under big umbrellas eating hunks of jerk chicken. There were maybe a dozen of us there, in the dusty courtyard of his little concrete house.

  I was talking to the chef de transport, Balu, from Tanzania—his long, glum face reminded me of Eeyore. Balu was unique in that in all his time in Haiti he never sought housing of his own. He kept a bedroll in the corner of his office and unrolled it at night. He had been living there for a year now.

  I asked him once if this was difficult.

  “I am come from African village!” he said. “This is everything good. I have electricity”—he was referring to the generators, which at Mission HQ went 24/7—“I have water. Maybe I am not even finding a house as good as this. Why should I be paying for anything more?”

  Balu had been hired as local staff in Tanzania, supporting the UN Mission to Congo. He had done a good job and won himself a place in Haiti.

  “I am not even number one in my village, or number two—I am number twelve!” he said. “If you ask anyone in village when I am boy where Balu will go one day, nobody will say, ‘Balu is going one day to United Nations.’ They will say, ‘Balu, he is going straight to Hell!’”

  Balu showed me photos of the house that he built for his family. The house was large and concrete, surrounded by a low wall. It was the Africa the Discovery Channel never shows: Balu had a subcompact car in the driveway, and there was a flowery little garden. Mrs. Balu was a pretty lady of substantial girth in a magnolia-printed dress, and the little Balus were obviously having some trouble sitting still for the photo, all smiles and teeth and elbows. Then there were Balu’s eight brothers and sisters and their wives and their chil
dren and a congress of cousins and the elderly Mama Balu, Papa Balu having gone to his sweet reward.

  I asked everyone I met on Mission to show me their families, and all the photos always looked like Balu’s: the concrete houses, the fat wives, the children, the new car, the flat-screen television. There was something reassuring and wonderful about those photos. If you understand those pictures, you’ll understand something about the world we live in.

  When Balu gets back home to Tanzania, he’ll be showing Lady Balu and the Baluettes photos of his life on Mission. Somewhere in those photos there’ll be a photo of me and a man named Terry White. For reasons known only to himself, Balu insisted on taking a picture of me with Terry—he seemed to think, because we were both Caucasian American males, that we formed a natural set, like unicorns. He got the two of us lined up in a row and said, “Now you make smiles! You are beautiful man!”

  Terry White! Who would believe such a name if it wasn’t his? No novelist would dare choose such a name in the context of Haiti. If you are white and walk down a Haitian street, someone will shout “blan!” at you within a minute; and if you walk for sixty minutes, you will hear sixty voices shouting “blan!” It meant “white!” and it meant “whitey!” and it meant “foreigner!” It meant “Hey you!” Sometimes it meant “Gimme money.” Sometimes it meant “Go home,” and sometimes, it just meant “Welcome to my most beautiful country!”

  In the photo Balu took that afternoon, Terry the White and I are standing in a dirt field with some banana trees behind us. Terry W. had been deputy sheriff in the Watsonville County Sheriff’s Office in northern Florida, not far from the Georgia border, and nothing in his appearance ran contrary to stereotype of the southern lawman: he stood about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, heavy legs, and a pair of solid boxer’s hands. I later learned that he had been on the offensive line in high school, and you could see it in his chest and feel it in his calluses. In Balu’s photo, he has his arm draped over my shoulder: I remember its weight, like a sack of sand. His face was square, not handsome, but not ugly, the kind of mug that you would be unhappy to see asking for your license and registration, but would find reassuring when he pulled up beside your stalled Subaru on a dark night on a lonely road. His short dark hair was interwoven with a subtle streak of gray. He was wearing military-style boots, cargo pants, a gray T-shirt tight across his broad chest, and a khaki overshirt to conceal his sidearm. He gave the impression of brooding, powerful strength; a short, restless temper; and sly intelligence.