“Hello, madame. A quarter-million U.S. dollars will do.”
“Okay,” Solange said, regaining her sang-froid, “but I need proof that she is still alive.”
The afternoon drizzle started again. A smell of doom seemed to hang in the air. Rows of children were making their way home from school. Beggars sat with their hands stretched toward the sky, perhaps waiting for the love of God that had been promised by evangelists of all stripes. Solange had just left Sogebank, the philosopher neighbor at her side and a briefcase full of money on her lap. Davernis was driving. In the car, no one said anything. There was both too much and too little to say.
The booted man walked quickly down the dark alley leading to Rosanna’s prison. He leapt over the piles of trash that littered the narrow alleys. The smell of decomposing flesh lingered in the air. He finally reached the front door of the cement shack.
The briefcase full of money under her arm, and her philosopher neighbor still at her side, Solange had Davernis drive her to the rendezvous spot, a dead-end street not far from her house, which overlooked a crowded cement shack-filled neighborhood below. At the entrance to the labyrinthine neighborhood was a trash heap that was always smoldering.
An hour went by: nothing. No Rosanna, no kidnappers!
Solange felt heartbroken and discouraged. Would everything truly end this way for Rosanna?
Her philosopher friend for once had no words of comfort or enlightenment. Finally her cell phone rang, and Davernis answered it.
“That was Melanie, madame,” Davernis said a moment later from the front seat. “Someone was going by and recognized Mademoiselle Rosanna in the trash heap down there.”
“What do you mean they recognized her?” Solange asked.
“She is dead, madame,” Davernis explained, his eyes filling up with tears, “and her body in such bad condition that only some of her is identifiable.”
“Then how do they even know? How can they even tell it’s her?” Solange pounded her fist on the suitcase full of money, crying like a child. Her mind, her body it seemed, was drifting into the past, back to the Canape Vert hospital where she’d visited her brother’s wife the day Rosanna was born, back to Rosanna’s baptism where she had promised to take over the parental duties should anything happen to her brother and his wife, back to the night that she’d learned of their death and had felt both agony and elation at the possibility of raising the girl herself.
And now Rosanna was gone. And suddenly the trash heap at the mouth of the slum that she had long ignored, a slum that was as much part of her neighborhood as the hilly houses of her closer neighbors, was much more visible to her. And when she rolled down the window of the Mercedes, she could clearly see in the distance this smoldering garbage heap where Rosanna had been dumped like refuse. The smell of decay in the air suddenly irritated her. Barely able to walk, Solange leaned on her neighbor’s shoulder as she left the car and moved toward the trash heap. Surely there would be an investigation, some press, some sympathy. And then, just as her philosopher neighbor had said, the mystery of Rosanna’s death would remain unsolved, like so many other mysteries in Port-au-Prince, whether in the slums or fancier neighborhoods. She tried to gather what was left of her courage just to keep walking through the mud and piles of trash. Then, all at once, they saw Rosanna.
“Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” she gasped.
Rosanna was as naked as the day she was born. Her body was covered with scratch marks, cuts, even what seemed like burns. Her face was swollen, her eyes gouged out, leaving two fleshy gashes. There were lines of dried blood on both sides of her mouth, which remained open, as though midscream.
Solange crumpled to the ground, her knees digging into the grime that was now cradling her niece, her beautiful niece.
“She fought,” Solange told those who attended Rosanna’s closed-casket funeral a week later. “She fought very hard for her life and her honor. Now it is our turn to fight for our lives and our honor.”
Solange had hoped that her private grief would somehow inspire a different resolution for Rosanna. She had hoped that her pleas to the authorities, to the press, would inspire someone to come forward to either deliver the killer or vow to at least try.
At the funeral, her philosopher neighbor sat discreetly in the back next to Davernis, who was waiting to follow the hearse in the Mercedes and return Solange home after the funeral. He had grown up with Rosanna, yet he could not allow himself to grieve as openly as Solange or even the throng of the girl’s mother’s relatives, who had heard about her death on the radio and had flocked to the funeral in Port-au-Prince to tell the stories about her mother that Rosanna had set out to Les Cayes hoping to hear.
“Ah, fate,” the philosopher neighbor sighed after one such speech from Rosanna’s maternal line.
“Indeed, mesye,” replied Davernis, who would never forgive himself for what had happened. He would also never forgive his collaborator, who had lost him such an important payday simply by lusting over the privileged flesh of some young bourgeois girl. Now they would have no choice but to try again. This time, the aunt.
MALOULOU BY MARIE LILY CERAT
Stay up long enough between midnight and three a.m. any day and you will hear Maloulou. But be careful to never run into her. Everyone in Lakou 22 knew this. Noises in the night defined that yard: husbands, young men, and prostitutes who caused old doors to creak while coming in some nights; lougawou, werewolves that turned skin inside out and jumped about loudly on tin ceilings, eyeing little children for future repasts; noise there always was. But the sounds of Maloulou were unique. With precision, many could reproduce the footsteps mixed with a light clinking of chains:
“Don’t worry, Ghislaine, Lakou 22 came with Maloulou,” Destin and Madame Destin, the very first residents to build shacks at the entrance of the yard, told my mother one morning soon after we moved there. Darkness did not worry my mother, but Maloulou would. My mother had braved the dark streets for as long as I could remember before retreating to her own cinder block-mounted bed, hidden behind the paisleyprint curtain to protect me from the parade of visitors whose fees paid for our shack, my school, our food and clothing. In some ways, I was my mother’s daughter; I was never afraid of the dark.
Like the Destins, other residents with nothing to do often gathered, coffee cups in hands, under bright early suns to swap Maloulou stories, as if competing for the most exciting rendition. There were those who laughed in disbelief, others appeared pensive when reports were shared about the mysterious thing that had always lived in their midst but had never been seen. Young ones like me attending to morning chores before hastily preparing for a discounted ride to school with Josaphat, the camionette driver who lived in Lakou 22, used to listen furtively, ears tuned to what was being said, eyes wide with amazement. Where the name Maloulou came from, no one really knew. One version of the story was that Maloulou came from the sea to the island with the name Nkiruka, but it was changed to Maloulou because it rolled easier on the tongue.
Nevertheless, the nomadic and infamous visitor who was said to roam our compound in the ink-blue night enthralled all. One man in particular, it was said, Roland Desir, might have come nose-to-nose with Maloulou.
Roland Desir turned mad one morning, the story went, and folks repeated verbatim the words of the person who saw it happen, his wife Marguerite, who stood in the middle of the yard sobbing, saying that maybe if she hadn’t confronted Roland about the children’s school fees lost in a cockfight the previous night, he might not have lost his head. Years later, Roland was still roaming the streets and corridors, speaking to himself, living under trees,
