What did it feel like, for her, to say Leblanc? At that moment, he was holed up in a dank house in Carrefour, smoking opium for the fourth day in a row. Charles Leblanc, she said. He said he needed help studying. He tricked me. He stowed me with his street friends. They put me in a house with a rooster stenciled above the door.
Already her father was on the phone. An hour later a contingent of Chilean soldiers attached to a UN peacekeeping mission took a battering ram to the flimsy front door of the opium den in Carrefour, and when Leblanc reached for his Glock, they shot him in the arm, and it dangles limp to this day. On the radio, the police said it was not yet time to rest easy. We have apprehended the white chimère, but he is not the only chimère. We will not rest until all chimères, black and white, have been apprehended. On the balcony, Samir spoke of justice and the rule of law, but on the phone with the magistrate, he said, Put him in the malarial cell, the tubercular cell, stick him with eleven murderers in a cell made for two or four, and the magistrate said, You know as well as I do that I can’t do that. He’s white. He’s Canadian. He gets books and magazines and as many meals as his mother and father want to bring him. I might bring him a television myself.
At the smaller airport the Miami boyfriend had chartered a plane for the Cayman Islands, and there was something suspicious in it. The customs agent hinted around about a bribe, but the boyfriend couldn’t read the tea leaves, offered a $10 bill where it would have taken a couple hundred, at minimum, to suffice. The customs agent dropped the $10 bill on the ground, declared his indignation, asked what the American had to hide. Nothing, the boyfriend said, you can search me, my bags, whatever you’d like, don’t target me with your bigotry. It was a big bluff, disastrous when the customs agent called it. When he found $10,000 among the luggage, he thought, This is it, the big one, my career is made. But when he called his supervisor, he was told to impound the money but let the boyfriend get on the plane and let the charter take off. Why? the customs agent said. Why do birds sing? the supervisor said. Why do senators keep me on speed-dial? Why do snakes eat babies?
In full view of everyone in the supermarket, the police came inside and talked to Samir Nasser. They went into the back room, and then Samir went into the room beside the customer-service counter and got Anna and brought her into the back room. They stayed there for a long time, the father and the daughter and the police. Then the police left, and the store closed early, only a half hour after the police left, and six hours before it was scheduled to close. The girl and her father did not leave the back room until after the store closed.
Leblanc’s father went on the radio. My son is innocent, he said. He does not have even the money to hire a lawyer. If he was not innocent he would have the money to hire the best lawyer in Haiti. You see who has the money. It is the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl. I ask you, why was he allowed to get on an airplane to Miami and safely leave the country? Why was he allowed to go free while my son rots in a terrible prison? Why do I have to bring my son food every day while this man’s son eats in the finest restaurants in Miami? How did the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl end up with the ransom money her parents paid?
Samir Nasser went on the radio. The facts are not all in, he said. We do not know all the facts. But this American was not a person known to our family. My daughter did not know this American. We will not know the truth until the facts are all in, but we have reason to believe that this American was part of a kidnapping ring with the Canadian Leblanc. We hope the American government will send this man back to Haiti so he may be questioned by the police.
I knew a woman whose niece was a cook for the Canadian missionaries. She said one night during this time, Leblanc’s father drove to the Nasser house. Leblanc’s father stood outside the gate and knocked for a long time. Then he started yelling. Two security guards with sawed-off shotguns pushed Leblanc’s father and told him to leave the property. But Leblanc’s father would not leave. He was shouting and crying, and he said, You can shoot me if you want. What do I care? You have already taken my son from me for no reason. You should know what it feels like for someone to take your child for no reason. The security guards began to push him, roughly, in the direction of the property next door, where his truck was parked, and when he had been pushed to the property line, he yelled for the girclass="underline" Aren’t you ashamed? I know what you have done. Everyone knows. Then he drove away.
It’s not what happens next that interests me. Leblanc spent thirteen months, without charges, in a jail cell before the Canadian foreign ministry made one phone call and sprang him, and he got on an airplane for Quebec, where he’s living still. The boyfriend finished medical school, did his residency in obstetrics, and makes a comfortable living delivering babies in Boca Raton. The Beirut lost no business to the grumbling, although the Nassers erected a twelve-foot wall around the parking lot, and topped it with broken glass and concertina razor wire. What interests me is Samir Nasser, a few evenings later, sitting with the information he hadn’t yet processed into knowledge, of his daughter and her certain betrayal, her deception, his shame. His daughter for whom he had wished to fashion wings so she might flap them north to Providence.
He wanted to annihilate himself with drink, and took the bottle of Glenlivet that sat full on his office desk, and went to his lover’s house, and drank it until she couldn’t bear watching him drinking it, and then he went into the bedroom alone, and she knocked on the door and said, Come out. Don’t be alone in there. Go home to your family.
He left her house but wouldn’t leave her porch until he finished the bottle, and then, although he felt it wasn’t safe, or perhaps because he thought it wasn’t safe, he walked the streets of the city, walked and walked, and sometime past midnight he was lost, even though he was less than five blocks from his home. He began to call people on his cell phone, people in New York and San Francisco and Pétion-Ville and Port-au-Prince, but no one would answer the phone. Finally he called the woman he wished he could have loved, and when she answered, she answered with great kindness. Tell me what you see where you are, she said, and he described the kindergarten across the street, the green and yellow cartoon characters, the X-shaped patterns in the balcony concrete, and she said two blocks in the direction of the moon, then the buzzer, the guard at the gate, the night watchman, the door, your bed.
By the time he arrived, he had decided. She was his daughter, and until the end of the world he would believe that she had not done it, that Leblanc had engineered even this terrible frame-up out of a great intelligence he had underestimated. Leblanc had undone everything, had brought to bear the greatest slander, but for two centuries the Nassers had overcome greater slanders, and one day Anna would own a whole country of supermarkets, would count the money, and, on her deathbed, divide it among her children. Until then, for as long as he lived, he would keep her close. I will trust you forever, he would say. I will put you in charge of the money-changing station. So he installed bulletproof glass in the back room of the Beirut, behind the iron bars, and he installed her there, behind the bulletproof glass. I have seen her there, through the glass, her and her father growing old in chairs behind the iron bars.
Joyce Carol Oates
The Home at Craigmillnar
From High Crime Area