They pulled out of the Santo Domingo hub and quickly emerged on aboveground suspended tracks to cross broad open plains and hills greened by recent rains. Evening had settled quickly over the island, casting everything in a magical sapphire twilight. The great spine of the Cordillera Centrale dominated the north, its peaks still fiery with sunset, glooming foothills covered with black bands of new forest and the lights of terraced farm resorts.
Mary had been led by her sources to expect beauty—she did not expect anything quite so breathtakingly idyllic. How could such a place have such a history? But then Hispaniola had not been so beautiful before Colonel Sir. His government had united the island in an almost bloodless series of coups, dispatching democratically elected leaders and tyrants alike to exile in Paris and China. He had overwhelmed all competing internal interests, nationalized all foreign industry, discovered and developed the southern offshore petroleum reserves with the help of the Brazilian underworld and used this seed money to set up a unique economy—selling the services of mercenaries and terrorists to select customers worldwide.
The industrialized nations of the world had discovered in the early twenty first century that some of the more brutal aspects of statecraft did not suit the tastes of their citizens. Colonel Sir had leaped into this vacuum with enthusiasm. His successes in fielding highly trained armies of Hispaniolan youths had brought in the finest currencies of the world to brace the almost valueless Haitian gourde and the failing Dominican peso.
Ten years into his rule he had begun replanting the long-ago denuded forests of Hispaniola, importing the best recombiners and agricultural experts to return the island to at least a semblance of its preColumbian youth.
Small well lighted whitewashed towns passed by on either side, details blurred by speed. She could only make out hints of wooden buildings and concrete apartment complexes for Hispaniolans; these were towns not generally open to tourists, towns where soldiers were raised and returned to live and bring more sons and daughters into the world to be soldiers.
Hispaniola’s armies, according to what she had read, numbered some one hundred and fifty thousand men. At several hours’ notice scramjets or suborbital transports could lift tens of thousands from one or another of the international airfields—temporarily closed to incoming flights—and send them anywhere in the world.
Seated across from her, Soulavier watched the fields and towns whisk by. “Alas, the world is peaceful lately,” he said. “Your government does not do much business with Cap Haïtien or Santo Domingo anymore. Colonel Sir is most unhappy about this.”
“You still have tourism and your petroleum and farms,” Mary said.
Soulavier lifted his hands, rubbed thumb and three fingers together on one palm signifying money and clapped the other hand over it as if to smother. “Petroleum—easier to make from your garbage mines,” he said. “Every country on Earth can grow enough food. Tourism has suffered. We have been called many nasty words. It makes us sad.” He sighed and shrugged as if to cast off the unpleasant subject, smiled again. “We still have the beauty. And we have ourselves. If our children do not go off to die for others, then that is well, too.”
No mention was made of the manufacture and export of hellcrowns. Perhaps Soulavier had nothing to do with that. She rather hoped that he didn’t.
The train passed through long tunnels and emerged onto a low desert shadowed by curve armed saguaro cactus and islands of dust colored bushes barely visible in the light from the train windows. Stars stood out stark and steady above the mountains. They passed into another tunnel.
“We have the variety of a continent,” Soulavier said wistfully. “You ask perhaps, who could come here and still have an evil temper?”
Mary nodded; the central puzzle of Hispaniolan history.
“I have studied our leaders. They start out good men, but within a few years, or sometimes as little as a few weeks, something changes in them. They begin to get angry. They fear strange forces. Like zealous old gods, they torture us and murder. In the end, before they die or are exiled, they are like little children…They are contrite and puzzled by what has happened to them. They smile into the camera eyes, ‘How could I have done this? I am a good man. It was not me. It was somebody else.’“
Mary was astonished to find such candor, but Soulavier continued: “All this before Colonel Sir. He has been here thirty years, as long as Papa Doc last century, with none of Papa Doc’s abiding cruelty. We owe much to Colonel Sir.”
Honest and sincere; Soulavier did not seem capable of hiding his true feelings. But they were certainly being hidden. He must know what she knew; the secret to Colonel Sir’s stability. Hispaniola had been graced with twenty years of extraordinary prosperity and comparatively gentle self government. If there was a possessing demon of pain and death on Hispaniola, Colonel Sir had subdued its effects on the island’s inhabitants by shipping its influence elsewhere.
“But I am not here to sell our island to you, am I?” Soulavier said with a chuckle. “Your business is official and has little to do with us. You are here to find a murderer. Straightforward work. Perhaps later you can return to Hispaniola to see us as we truly are, to relax and enjoy yourself.”
Beyond the tunnel gleamed the lights of Port-au-Prince, caught between the dark Caribbean and the mountains.
“Ah,” Soulavier said, twisting to look across the aisle and out the opposite windows. Mary noted this motion; not the studied grace of a diplomat but of a quick unselfconscious athlete or street urchin. “We are here.”
As the train slowed, coasting the last few kilometers into the depot, Soulavier pointed out the major tourist hotels government buildings museums, all solid early twenty first century glass walled stone and steel and concrete. Clean and well lighted. Just before the depot they hummed through a broad quarter called the Vieux Carré that preserved preColonel Sir architecture—ingenious wood and cracked concrete with tile and corrugated tin roofing. In the Vieux Carré the buildings were studiously shabby and seldom more than a single story.
Soulavier preceded her onto the covered platform and for the first time she had direct contact with the air of Hispaniola. It was warm and balmy and blew gently through the station carrying the scent of flowers and cooking. Trailed by the arbeiters they walked past stainless steel carts where vendors sold fried fish and boiled crab, peanut butter seasoned with peppers, cold Hispaniolan beer. The train station contained only a few dozen tourists and the vendors avidly competed for their dollars. Soulavier’s presence kept them away from Mary. “Alas,” Soulavier said, indicating the dearth of tourists with widespread arms. “Now they say nasty words about us.”
A government limousine waited for them, parked in a white strip. Gasoline and electric taxis and gaily decorated taptaps had been pushed aside and parked at decent intervals on both sides, their drivers lounging, eating, reading. Three men and two women in red shirts and denims danced around the cart of a beverage vendor, flickering their hands gaily at Soulavier and Mary. Soulavier bowed to the dancers, smiling apologetically as if to say, “Alas, I cannot dance, I am at serious work.”
The limousine was no more than ten years old and automatic. It drove them at a stately pace through the streets to the quartiers diplomatiques. Soulavier had become quite subdued. They approached a brick walled compound and passed through a gate guarded by soldiers in black uniforms and chrome helmets. The soldiers watched them with narrow eyed suspicious dignity. The car did not stop.
Within the walls lay a pleasant neighborhood of simple uniformly colored bungalows with prominent front porches and trellises covered by everblooming bougainvillea. The car stopped before one such bungalow and swung its door open. Soulavier leaned forward, suddenly assumed a puzzled expression and said, “Inspector Choy, I am arranging for a meeting with Colonel Sir himself. Tomorrow, perhaps late. You will start with our police in the morning, but you will have lunch or dinner with Colonel Sir.”