IN THE LATE afternoon, Vincent Paul got into a jeep and left the slum. A truck and two more vehicles followed him out.
Max tailed them out of town, through dusty, arid flatlands and clumps of buildings that were either half-built or half-ruined. Then, as night fell, they headed up into the mountains, clinging to a steep, meager crust of dirt road, which was all that separated them from hundreds of feet of thin air.
The last stretch of the journey took them across a plateau. They made for a small bonfire, near where the convoy came to a halt. The vehicles then positioned themselves so that they were facing each other, and their headlights intersected and lit up a square of rough, rocky earth.
Max killed his lights, rolled a little closer to the place where they’d stopped, and got out of the car. He established his bearings so he could find his way back, then he approached the convoy.
The back of the truck was opened. There was fierce shouting both inside and out, and then a man was thrown out. He hit the ground with a thud, a scream, and the thick jingle of chains. One of Vincent’s men picked him up and slammed him up against the truck.
Then more men were pushed out of the truck, all landing on top of one another. Max counted eight of them. They were marched into the lit-up space between the vehicles.
Max got a little closer. A group of a dozen or more civilians were watching what was happening.
Max walked off to the left, staying in the darkness. He had a clear view of the captives, who were lined up in a row. They were dressed in UN military uniforms and looked Indian.
Arms behind his back, Paul inspected them, glaring down at each and every one of them as he passed. He resembled a father angry with his unruly brood; the men, compared to him, were small and snappable.
“Do you any of you speak and understand English?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” they answered as one.
“Who’s the commanding officer here?”
A man stepped forward and stood at attention. He tried to meet Paul’s eyes but his head traveled so far back he seemed to be staring up at the sky, seeking out some distant star.
“And you are?”
“Captain Ramesh Saggar.”
“Are these your men?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why you’ve been brought here?”
“No. Who are you?” the captain asked in a heavy accent.
Paul glanced briefly over at the civilians, then back at the captain.
“Do you know why you’re in this country?”
“I’m sorry?”
“What is the purpose of your presence here, in Haiti? What are you doing here? You, your men, the Bangladeshi division of the United Nations army?”
“I-I-I don’t understand.”
“You don’t understand what? The question? Or what you’re doing here?”
“Vye are you asking me dis?”
“Because I’m the one asking the questions and you’re the one answering them. They’re simple questions, captain. I’m not exactly asking you to divulge military secrets.”
Paul was all business, his tone pointed but even, without emotion. If he was following the sort of interrogation procedure Max thought he was, his calm, no-nonsense manner was the prelude to an explosion. Joe had been brilliant at that—used his bulk to intimidate and terrify the suspect, and then confused them by coming over all reasonable and quiet and to the point—“Look, just tell me what I want to know and I’ll see what kind of deal I can cut you with the DA”—and then, if it wasn’t working or the scumbag was a particularly sick fuck, or Joe was just having a bad day—KA-FUCKING-BOOM!—he’d backhand them to the floor.
“Answer my question. Please.”
“Ve are here to keep de peace.”
Max heard the first tremor in the captain’s voice.
“To ‘keep the peace’?” Paul repeated. “Are you doing that?”
“Vat is dis about?”
“Answer my question. Are you doing your job? Are you keeping the peace?”
“Yes, I—I dink so.”
“Why?”
“Dere is no civil var here. De people are not fighting.”
“True. For now,” Paul looked at the other seven soldiers, all standing at ease. “Would you say your job—this ‘keeping the peace’ you think you’re doing so well—would you say an aspect of it would involve protecting the Haitian people?”
“Pro-protecting?”
“Yes, protecting. You know, preventing harm from coming to them. Do you understand?”
Now there was a hint of venom in Paul’s voice.
“Yes.”
“Well, then? Are you doing your job here?”
“I-I-I dink so.”
“You think so? You think so?”
The captain nodded. Paul glared at him. The captain averted his eyes. His composure was cracking.
“So then, tell me, captain. Do you think ‘protecting the Haitian people’ does or does not include raping women—actually, no—let me be more specific. Do you think, Captain Saggar, that ‘protecting the Haitian people’ involves raping and beating up teenage girls?”
Saggar said nothing. His lips were trembling, his whole face quaking.
“Well?” Paul asked, leaning in close.
No reply.
“ANSWER MY DAMN QUESTION!” Paul roared and everyone, including Paul’s own troops, jumped. Max felt the voice in his gut, like deep speaker bass.
“I-I-I—”
“Aie-Aie-Aie,” Paul mimicked in a faggot voice. “Are your feet on fire, captain? No? Well, answer me.”
“N-n-n-no it does not, but—but—but—”
Paul held his hand up for silence and Saggar flinched.
“Now you know what this is about—”
“Sorry!” the captain blurted.
“What?”
“Ve said ve vere sorry. Ve wrote letter.”
“What—this?” Paul took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and read it out loud. “Dear Mr. Le Fen—that’s that man over there by the jeep, red shirt, that’s him—I am writing to apologize on behalf of both my men and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force for the regrettable incident involving your daughter and some men under my command. We will endeavor to make sure this kind of incident is not repeated. Yours sincerely, Captain Ramesh Saggar.”
Paul slowly folded the letter and slipped it back into his pocket.
“Do you know that ninety percent of the Haitian population is illiterate? Did you know that, captain?”
“N-n-no.”
“No? Do you also know that English isn’t the first language here?”
“Yes.”
“It’s actually the third language, if you like. But ninety-nine percent of the people don’t speak English. And Mr. Le Fen is one of the majority. So what good’s a LETTER WRITTEN IN ENGLISH going to do?—HEH? More to the point—what good’s a LOUSY LETTER going to do to Verité Le Fen? Do you know who that is, captain?”
Saggar didn’t answer.
Paul called to the group and held his arm out. A girl came over, limping badly. She faced Saggar. They were the same height, although the girl was in an unnatural slouch. Max couldn’t see her face, but judging from the captain’s expression, she must have been in real bad shape.
Max looked over to the soldiers. One—a skinny bald man with a thick mustache—was shaking.
“Do you recognize her, captain?”
“I’m velly sorry,” Saggar said to her. “Vat ve did to you vas bad.”
“As I explained, captain, she can’t understand you.”
“P-p-please translate.”
Paul told the girl. She whispered into Paul’s ear. Paul looked at Saggar.
“Vat did she say?”
“‘Languette maman ou’—literally, your mother’s clit. Figuratively, ‘Fuck you.’”
“Vat—vat are you going to do to us?”
Paul reached into his breast pocket again. He pulled out something small, and handed it to Saggar, who looked at it, his expression stunned, then disbelieving, then confused. It was a photograph.
“Vere—vere did you get this?”
“In your office.”
“But—but—”
“Nice-looking girls. What are their names?”
Saggar looked at the picture and started to sob.
“Their names, captain?”
“If—if you—if you hurt any of uz dere vill be velly much trouble for you.”
Paul beckoned the last man on the row to come over. He positioned him opposite Saggar, took a few steps back, drew his pistol, and shot the man through the temple. The soldier’s body crumpled into a heap on the ground, blood geysering out of the hole in his head. Saggar cried out.
Paul holstered his pistol, walked over, and kicked the body to one side.
“What are your daughters’ names, captain?”
“M-m-m-meena and Ssss-su-su-sunita.”
“Meena?” Paul pointing to the picture. “The eldest? The one with the hairband?”
Saggar nodded.
“How old is she?”
“Th-thir-thirteen.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
“What would you do to me if I raped her?”
Saggar said nothing. He looked down at the ground.
“Don’t look at your feet, captain—look at your daughter. Good. Now, imagine I raped your daughter. Can you?” Paul looked at the officer. “Picture the scene: me and my buddies are driving down the street one day. There are eight of us. We see Meena, walking, on her own. We stop and talk to her. We ask her to come for a ride with us. She refuses, but we take her anyway. Right there, in broad daylight, plenty of witnesses to identify us, but no one to stop us because we’re in military uniform and we have guns.
“Oh, I forgot to mention this minor point—in our spare time we’re UN peacekeeping troops. We’re here to protect you. Only the people we’re protecting are actually terrified of us. You know why? Because we’re always snatching young girls like Meena off the street.”
Saggar was looking back at the ground, head hung, shoulders slumped, stance crumbling: fear and guilt, but not yet resignation to his fate. He couldn’t believe Paul was going to kill him and his men. That hadn’t registered. Max knew he was. He’d given the leader of the gang that had kidnapped Manuela a similar speech. He’d used the guy’s kid sister as an example, trying to throw the crime back in his face, personalize it, make him feel it, the damage, the pain. It hadn’t gone to plan. The gang leader told Max he’d got so wasted on crack and PCP one time he’d fucked his kid sister in the ass. Five months later he’d started pimping her out to the local pedophile. Max had blown the motherfucker’s brains out without regret or remorse.
“We drive your daughter to an isolated place. She’s a brave girl—a gutsy girl—your daughter—Meena. She’s a fighter. She bites one of my buddies, almost takes his finger off. So he caves her teeth in with his rifle butt. And then he grabs her by her ears and forces his cock down her throat while another of my guys holds his gun to her head. Everyone has their turn. Everyone except me and the driver. I’m above all that. You know, if I want pussy I put on two condoms and go to one of those Dominican whores near my barracks. As for the driver? He refuses to join in.
“When my guys are done in her mouth, they rape little Meena. Twice. Each. We take her virginity—we really rip the little bitch open, tear her apart inside. Literally. She’s hemorrhaging. We notice—obviously. So what do we do? Stop and take her to a doctor? No. We turn her over and fuck her in the ass. Twice. Each. Then, you know what we do? We piss on her and drive off, looking for the next girl.
“Meena’s found two days later. Nearly dead. Do you know how many stitches it takes, just to sew up her vagina? One hundred and eighty-three! And she’s thirteen years old.”
Saggar started crying.
“I-I-I…I didn’t do anything,” he whimpered.
“You stood by and let it happen. They’re your men, under your command. One word from you and they would’ve stopped. You have to accept full responsibility.”
“Look—report me to my superior. I sign confession. They vill—”
“—‘Discipline you in accordance with UN military regulations’? ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY!” Paul shouted. “The Le Fen family went to your superiors before they came to me. Did you know that? And what did your superiors do? They made you send a written apology to the family. So what’ll they do this time? Sentence you to washing my car?”
“Please,” Saggar said, falling to his knees. “Please don’t kill me.”
“If that had been your daughter you’d want to kill me, wouldn’t you?”
“Please,” he blubbered.
“Answer my question.”
“I vood turn you over to justice,” Saggar bawled.
“Do you know we have no laws here in Haiti? No laws for absolutely anything? Bill Clinton’s torn up our Constitution so he can pay his Arkansas lawyer clique to write us a new one? So, while we’re waiting for Bill to play Moses, why don’t we give you some Bangladeshi justice? Tell me, captain. What is the penalty for rape in your country?”
Saggar didn’t reply.
“Come on. You know.”
Saggar sobbed but didn’t answer.
“You know I know. I looked it up,” Paul said. “I just want to hear you say it.”
“D-d-d-death.”
“Sorry?”
“Death penalty.”
“So rape is judged so extreme a crime in your country it’s punishable by death, but you think it’s OK here? Is that it?”
“You said dere is no justice here.”
“Only among Haitians. You see, this is our country. Not yours. You can’t come over here and treat us like this. Not without consequences. And I am those consequences.”
“My men just vanted to have zome fun. Dey not mean to hurt de girl.”
“Try explaining that to her, will you? Do you know you bastards didn’t just ruin her face forever, you ruptured her spine, so she’ll never be able to walk properly again? She won’t be able to carry anything on her back. Women carry everything in this country. So she’s as good as dead when she grows up. You ruined her life. You might as well have killed her,” Paul said.
Saggar’s face was shiny with tears.
Paul pointed to the right. “Go and stand over there.” Saggar stumbled forward. “Stop. Stay.” One of Paul’s men trained a rifle on the captain’s head.
Paul went up to the Bangladeshis and grabbed one of them by the arm. He inspected his hand and then jerked him out of the line. The soldier didn’t have time to move his feet. His legs went limp and Paul dragged him along the ground by his shirtfront and stood him up where Saggar had been.
“What’s your name?”
“Sanjay Veja!” the soldier shouted. He was the only bald and clean-shaven man in the group.
“She bit your finger so you broke her face with your rifle. You were the first one in. The one who hurt her the most. Do you have anything to say to that?”
“No,” Veja said.
“Take off your trousers.”
“V-vat?”
“Your trousers,” Paul pointed and repeated slowly, “Take—them—off.”
Veja looked at his fellow soldiers. None of them looked back at him. He complied. Paul stepped away from him and began rummaging on the ground, picking up, weighing, and rejecting rocks until he found what he wanted—two large, flat, smooth ones that he just about got his huge hands around.
“And your underwear. That too,” Paul said, without turning around.
After another look back at his comrades in arms, Veja timidly stepped out of his white boxers.
Paul went up to him, arms behind his back.
“Hold up your dick.” Paul looked to make sure he’d complied. “Now stand at ease.”
Max watched Paul lower himself into a tensed-up catcher’s crouch, eye-to-eye with the soldier. He took a deep breath through his nose, and then, at the speed of a blink, he whipped his rock-holding hands around from behind his back and slammed them together on Veja’s dangling scrotum. Max heard two sounds—the loud crack of the rocks impacting and, right behind it, a strained, wet pop.
The soldier’s mouth dropped wide-open, as if all his jaw muscles had dissolved. His eyes pushed up out to the rims of his sockets, and every vein and artery in his skull bulged up in a network of thick, gorged knots.
Veja first screamed in an unnaturally low register. Then, as the realization of what had happened to him caught up with the pain, the scream cracked into a rush of terrible, terrifying howls, delivered in searing bursts from the pit of his soul. Max felt Veja’s cries all the way down deep inside of him and wanted to puke. Some of the soldier’s comrades did just that, while two fainted and the rest—including Captain Saggar—wept, whimpered, and pissed themselves.
Paul wasn’t finished. He jerked his arms sharply to the left, until his elbow was in line with his neck and his whole body shook with the strain and effort. Max saw the soldier’s naked right leg lifted up off the ground, his foot shaking. Paul repeated the whole motion with his right side, before bringing his arms back down and then twisting them rapidly back and forth, as if he was wringing out wet clothes.
He stopped. He gulped down air, filling and clearing his airways with great big breaths before he uttered a heavy, exhausted grunt and tore Veja’s mangled scrotum from his body with a massive backward lurch. The sound of it going reminded Max of stitches popping and tight fistfuls of feathers being simultaneously ripped out of chickens.
Veja staggered backwards, two steps, three, one, mouth working soundlessly, throat spasming up and down, all screamed out, unable to expel any more of his immense pain. He lurched forward and then went back again.
Max saw the bloody gash in the middle of his legs, the crimson rivulets pouring down his thighs.
Veja reached for his violated crotch and touched the mush below his dick.
Paul tossed the blood-soaked rocks and flesh away.
Veja brought his bloody fingers up to his eyes, studied them closely, and then, just as his face began to crumple into tears, he keeled back and slammed into the ground, cracking his skull.
He was dead.
Paul took out his gun and put a round in Veja’s head. Then he dragged another soldier, screaming and pleading and crying, out of the shattered group. Paul slapped the man’s face with a huge, bloody paw.
“You stay here and watch your friends. Just like you did when they raped the girl,” he said and turned him around to face his comrades. He then shouted at the two guards who were watching Saggar. They shoved him over to his men.
“You are animal—monster!” Saggar yelled out at Paul. “You vill be punished for this.”
Paul stepped away and whistled. The rocks began to fly.
The first volley came from the girl’s family, who’d moved into position, opposite the rapists. They threw large rocks at them, over-and underarm, and fired smaller ones by catapult. All found their targets—heads were opened, brows were split, eyes were put out.
The rapists tried to run backwards but they met an immediate hail of rocks flying out of the darkness, hurled and shot at them by unseen hands. One soldier was knocked out, another dropped to the floor and pulled his legs up in fetal position.
The rocks flew into heads and faces and knees and chests. Max saw a man killed when one catapulted rock struck his cheek and spun him right into the path of another, high-velocity stone that caved his temple in and rammed skull bone into his brain.
Saggar was on all fours, scrambling around, feeling his way along the ground, blood covering his face from a gash in his forehead, one eye buried under a mound of swollen skin.
None of the rapists were left standing when the Le Fen family moved in, sticks and machetes in hand, Verité leading the way, helped along by her father. The other rock-throwers came out of the darkness and together they formed a circle around the fallen men.
Moments later, the sounds of beating and pounding and stabbing and slashing came from the circle. Max heard a few cries of pain, but it all seemed minor after Veja’s screams that were still clearly echoing around his head.
The crowd worked on the bodies, letting out their hatred, sucking up as much raw vengeance as they could before their muscles gave out and tiredness got the better of them.
When they staggered away, they left behind a pulped vermilion mass, a gleaming, viscous lake of retribution.
A guard went around and put nominal bullets in the skulls that were still intact.
Paul looked at the driver.
“Now—you—I want you to go back to your barracks in Port-au-Prince and tell everyone what happened. Start with your friends and colleagues, then tell your commanding officer. Tell them I was responsible. Vincent Paul. You understand?”
The man nodded, his teeth chattering.
“And when you tell them what happened, tell them this from me—if any of you ever rape or harm any of our women and children in any way, we will kill you—like that,” he said, pointing at the tangle of body parts. “And if any of you come looking for revenge, rounding up our people, we will all rise up and massacre each and every one of you. And that isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. Now go.”
The driver started walking away, very slowly, head down, slouching, steps uncertain, as though they were the first he’d taken in a long while and half-expected his legs to give way. He put a good few meters between himself and the scene, and then he broke into a run and disappeared into the night like a man on fire who’s spotted water.
Paul went to be with the family.
Max couldn’t move. He was numb with shock and disgust, his mind paralyzed by conflict. He hated all rapists and, in theory, up to the moment it had happened, he had agreed with Paul’s actions.
True, what the soldiers had done was evil, and their official “punishment” had been a joke, an insult to the victim, but justice hadn’t been served by Paul’s act. The girl hadn’t got her life and innocence back, just the satisfaction of knowing that the rapists had been punished, that they’d suffered before dying. But what good would that do her next year, and the year after? What good was it doing her now?
Sure, the punishment Paul had meted out would be a deterrent—in Haiti—but once the UN troops moved on they’d do it somewhere else, in another land they’d been dispatched to “to keep the peace” in.
A better, more responsible way, would have been for Paul to have talked to the press, stirred up a major stink about the rape, and forced the UN to prosecute its troops and make it plain that such conduct was unacceptable.
But then Max thought of Sandra and asked himself what would he have done in Paul’s place. Taken them in and waited a year for some judge to maybe sentence them to fifteen to life if the evidence stood up? No, of course not. He would have castrated the motherfuckers with his bare hands too.
What was he thinking, exactly? Paul was right. What did Paul give a fuck what the UN did elsewhere? This was his homeland and these were his people. That’s as far as he saw.
Fair play. Fuck ’em.
Max sneaked away back to his car and drove off.