The same young woman looked up. “May I help you, Mr. Lowen?”
“A question. Actually, several. First, what’s worth seeing down in the town?”
She pursed her lips in thought. “I recommend the marketplace. You will see all sorts of native foods and goods. You might also want to look at the church. The carved wooden doors are considered to be works of art. And speaking of art, you will find a number of art shops.”
“We were on our balcony and I noted the mountains south of town. There seems to be a square structure of some sort on top of one of them. What is it?”
Her face screwed up in thought. “A structure? On top of one of the mountains? You must be mistaken. There is nothing in those mountains other than a few mud huts.”
“As I said, it just looks square,” Gurt added.
Hand in hand, Gurt and Lang stepped from the area of the desk into the searing sunlight on the road. Immediately, a group of four or five men who had been sitting in the shade of a mahogany tree jumped to their feet and came trotting over.
“Need guide?”
“Very best guide, sir, madam.”
“Show you Cap Haitien? Five dollar, American.”
Lang had heard about these “guides.” A tour of the local area was their secondary function. The primary duty was to keep at bay the child beggars and overly aggressive vendors that swarmed the few tourists like flies to rancid meat. He selected the youngest of the group. A man-boy, really-whose legs were visibly twisted by pellagra, polio or some other symptom of dietary deficiency and the country’s lack of health care. Only two canes allowed him to walk, an exaggerated swagger that was painful to watch.
“How much?” Lang wanted to know as the other candidates sullenly retreated back to the shade.
“Five dolla, American.”
That seemed to be the standard price.
“What’s your name?”
“Paul.”
“OK, Paul, what are you going to take us to see?”
“We go market, church.” He nodded toward Gurt. “Then lady shop.”
Despite the horribly malformed legs of his guide, Lang was having to walk quickly to keep up with Paul, whose adeptness with his walking sticks would have been admired by a Special Olympics athlete.
Lang touched his arm, stopping him about halfway down the hill and pointing. “Paul, can you see that square thing on top of the mountain?”
The afternoon haze made the mountains little more than shadows but Paul immediately saw what Lang was talking about. “Citadelle.”
“Citadelle?”
Paul nodded vigorously. “After French leave Haiti, Henri Christophe no want them to come back. Build Citadelle.”
“Ah,” Lang exclaimed. “So, it’s a fortress of sorts.” He looked closer. “But what is it, twenty miles away? It could hardly protect the town from that distance.”
Paul treated Lang to a grin. “Christophe not defend town. Plan was to burn it and all crops, then go where big French guns could not reach: top of the mountain, where he could exist with five thousand people for a year, block mountain pass to interior of country. You want to see? I can arrange.”
Sound military strategy, Lang thought. Leave the invading French with nothing but ruins, nothing to sustain their army that they hadn’t brought themselves. “Yes, I’d like that. But, Paul, is this Citadelle something everyone around here knows about?”
Paul studied Lang’s face for a second as though he thought Lang might be joking. “Everyone know about Citadelle, yes.”
“OK. How do we get there?”
“Take taxi most of way. Last mile or two be by horse.”
“Can we go now?” Gurt asked. “I’ll need to change into pants.”
Paul nodded. “Twenty minutes. Cab be at hotel. We go.”
Gurt and Lang watched him move down the hill with both a speed and agility that belied his deformity before they turned to climb back toward their room.
“Why do you suppose the woman at the front desk said there was nothing up in those mountains but mud huts?” Lang pondered.
“Perhaps she was ignorant,” Gurt suggested.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
“Maybe she did not want us to be spending money outside the hotel.”
A logical answer but not one Lang believed any more than the first.
Minutes later, he was watching Gurt wriggle into a pair of jeans. “Do you always buy them so tight?”
She inhaled to button the front. “They shrink after the first washing.”
“So why not buy a size larger?”
Gurt sniffed, the answer obvious to any woman. “Because I wear a size eight or ten. If I bought a size larger, everyone would think I was getting fat.”
Lang knew better than to pursue that. Instead, he said, “I’m not happy about having to ride horses.”
Gurt inhaled again, this time for the zipper’s benefit. “The exercise will do you good.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like anything both bigger and dumber than I am.”
Milo, Haiti
An hour and a half later
Lang need not have worried about something bigger than he was. The horses gathered around a central corral were smaller than most burros. Astride one, his feet cleared the ground only by inches. The worn saddle did little to protect him from the razor back of his mount.
The town, Milo, was a small agricultural community of wooden huts amid small fields of coffee plants and banana trees. Several sheets spread on the ground displayed reddish beans that would turn chocolate brown as they dried. A second source of income was tourism or, as Paul explained, had been, before the fall of the last Duvalier over twenty years ago had precipitated a series of leaders, elected or otherwise, who were soon ousted by the next aspirant to power.
The three, Paul, Lang and Gurt, set off uphill on their diminutive mounts.
Gurt held her reins loosely. “It is as if they know where we go.”
Paul gave her a smile. “The only trip they know, here to the Citadelle and back. If you let go, they go there and return.”
Within minutes, the trail passed massive ruins of stone. At one time a structure far larger than anything Lang had seen in Haiti had been there.
Paul noted his interest. “Palace of Sans Souci, built by Christophe between 1810 and 1813. When he committed suicide, people pull down most of the buildings and earthquake in 1842 pull down whatever left.”
Past the sloping field on which the former palace was located, the path narrowed and began to rise sharply. Lang was beginning to wish he had brought a sweater. The air was no longer pregnant with moisture, but cool to the skin. They were sheltered from the sun by increasing vegetation on each side of the trail. Vines bigger around than Lang’s arm swooped low from massive branches of trees he could not identify. Unseen birds chattered in impenetrable shadows. Clearly this part of Haiti had not been deforested. At irregular intervals, the trio passed tiny mud huts squatting amid a row or two of stunted corn. Their arrival prompted naked children playing homemade flutes and drums to dance for coins tossed from horseback. Mangoes and stubby green bananas seemed to flourish without cultivation. Smiling women with huge jugs of water on their heads danced down the ragged path with steps as light as they were sure.
Twice Lang pulled his little horse to a stop and listened. He was certain he had heard something behind them, the ring of a steel shoe striking a rock, the whinny of a horse. He did not recall seeing any other tourist in Milo, and he was fairly certain no Haitian would ride up to the Citadelle for the fun of it. There was something wrong, though he could not have enunciated exactly what.
Squeezing between Gurt’s horse and the encroaching growth to ride side by side, he watched Paul in the
