The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Kyle Minor A kidnapping in Koulèv-Ville From The Normal School

The top floor of the Beirut Supermarket was a fur shop — fox, rabbit, mink, beaver, otter, sable, seal, coyote, and chinchilla. Other racks displayed cowboy hats, suede jackets, thigh-high leather boots, knee boots, harness boots, stacked heels, stiletto heels, kitten heels, pumps, platforms, mules, and sling-backs. The middle floor was a children’s boutique, with shelves filled to the ceiling with the kinds of toys you never saw anyplace else in Haiti — Star Wars TIE fighters and programmable Lego robots, Barbie dolls and Nerf guns, a five-foot-tall princess play castle and a diesel-powered go-kart with a driver’s seat sized for a six-year-old. Things for rich ladies, rich children. Money things.

All the real action was at ground level, on the grocery floor, which was as well stocked as any food store anywhere, a credit to the Nasser family, and especially to Samir Nasser, chief proprietor, who had inherited two tiny storefront operations from his father and grandfather and turned them into a twelve-store import-and-retail operation spanning from Cap-Haïtien to Jacmel, of which the Beirut was the crown jewel. The fruit came through the port in Saint-Marc if it wasn’t local. Husky tangerines, golden kiwi, Cavendish bananas, freestone nectarines, bunches of grapes. Purple grapes, green grapes, black grapes. Other sweets too. Chocolates and red velvet cakes and baklavas and taffies and ice creams and sherbets. And dry goods in packages lettered in French, Spanish, English, Dutch, and Arabic. In the back of the store, the vodkas, rums, and whiskeys lived in a dark anteroom, the backlit shelves glowing like Amsterdam in a phosphorescent bluish white. Past the liquor area, another dark room, this one carpeted in Persian rugs and ringed in black-and-white frescoes after the manner of the woodcuts in Frankétienne’s Dezafi, and where, more than once, I saw Samir’s fingers brush the edges of the iron bars that guarded the money-changing station.

The rest of what I knew about Samir Nasser could fit in a paragraph. He was rich. He was fit. He was short and handsome. He was well regarded in the community. He was married. His one daughter, beloved Anna, was a senior at the Baptist high school in Koulèv-Ville. They belonged to a large extended family of Maronite Christians who had emigrated from Lebanon in the late nineteenth century. The rumor is that one brother impregnated the fiancée of another and boarded a ship and fled for Marseille, but that’s how the Lebanese are sometimes slandered. More likely the founding Nassers sailed from France in hope of selling silk in some American port — New York or Boston or Baltimore or New Orleans — but they never made it past Port-au-Prince. Maybe something went wrong — news arrived of immigration hassles or violence on the American side, or a silk deal went bad and the family was stranded without money. Or maybe something went right. Maybe one of the Nassers fell in love on the island and wanted to marry. Maybe they found a thriving marketplace at the port and saw an opportunity to make a lucrative living as middlemen. Maybe it was simply the Caribbean sky that I miss so much now that I no longer get to live beneath it — a quality of light so embracing, so flattering, that it is impossible for a person to be ugly.

It seems right to speak now of ugliness and beauty. There’s Anna Nasser, seventeen years old, standing in her white dress on the balcony of the Beirut Supermarket. I was the photographer who snapped the famous picture. That’s her face, lit by three hundred vigil candles. There’s the priest from Bel Air. There are the people, marchers rich and poor, standing in solidarity against the kidnappings, against the gangs of chimères, against every variety of violence and extortion. There’s Samir, weeping openly in the company of all of them, warning against mob violence, saying, Anna’s kidnappers must be brought to justice in the courts, not the streets. The law must be honored. It is a new day in Haiti. But today, we celebrate. My daughter was lost and now she is found.

Then he gave the signal, and the produce salesmen passed baskets of fruit throughout the crowd, and the fur salesmen launched the fireworks from the roof of the Beirut. Skyrockets and Roman candles and enormous fire fountains that sprayed thirty feet into the air. I took a tangerine in my mouth, and then a nectarine, and bit, and tasted their cold juices. A massive Catherine wheel, powered by a hundred fuse-lit explosives, spun blue wires of sparks in circles that many later claimed could be seen from space. Certainly they could be seen throughout the city and beyond, from the low-lying slums of La Saline and Cité Soleil to the high places at the edge of the mountains north, south, and east.

We joined hands, and the mizik rasin band began with the drums and the guitars and the horns and the singers. It seemed to me that all the world was being emptied of its ugliness. In the streets people began to dance, and I was dancing, and even a few days later, when it was discovered that we had been marching and weeping and dancing in the service of an elaborate lie, I still could taste the nectarine in my mouth, the brown wet ridges of the pit on my tongue.

Around the Baptist school at Koulèv-Ville, some of the teachers say Samir Nasser pushed his daughter too hard. Unlike almost every other Nasser father, he wanted her to go away and stay gone. He tutored her in math until the math got beyond him, around the trigonometry stage, which she had reached by the second semester of the ninth grade, and he tutored her in science until the science got away from him, which was around the first semester of the tenth. His idea was that she’d become a brain surgeon, and every morning before school he lectured her about the entrance test for medical school, the MCAT, which wasn’t as far away, he reminded her, as she might think. He believed that the finest undergraduate education in the world could be found only in Providence, Rhode Island, at Brown University, where, as he had read in a business magazine, Ted Turner had come into the maverick genius that had enabled him to invent cable television and buy up half the available grazing land in the American West. Let me tell you how long life is, Samir told Anna, and then he’d blink or snap his fingers. He demanded straight A’s; he hired tutors from among the Baptist school faculty and from the university. He punished her severely for any A-minus or B-plus: No cell phone. No occasional beering. No dancing with friends at the teen club. He didn’t hit her, but she’d rather have been hit. Some say she got enjoyment from being hit in other ways, but that’s not for me to say.

They never let me into the teen club, but many times I have imagined it. Bodies glistening and glitter and crepe paper and the thumping that travels from the speakers to the floor to the blood your heart hustles. Flushed flesh and eye makeup, even on the boys, a phenomenon you shouldn’t pillory until you’ve tried wearing it around town after a Diwali party. You walk into a drugstore in Lincoln, Nebraska, at two in the morning, and you’re dangerous, a feeling worth chasing, and surely Anna Nasser had it in her same as you and me, that seeking after shadows, that dark desire. I want to make an argument on behalf of prurience. Go home tonight and pick up a book or turn on your television when nobody’s watching you. What are you watching? If it’s a cooking show, imagine something goes wrong. The chef burns himself, and it’s live TV, and there’s a brown streak the length of his forearm, and now there’s the cameramen you usually never see, running into the frame, carrying buckets of ice or salves or whatever in advance of the medical people. Or maybe there’s a fire. Maybe it’s a NASCAR race, and you’re waiting for the crash. Maybe it’s a documentary on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maybe it’s a loup-garou, fur and fangs, or spirits, ghosts, vampires, rabid hoot owls, children raised by wolves, women without faces. Your attention is perked up, and mine is too. Forget bearing witness, forget concern for the pain of others, forget every noble justification. Mortality is in view, families might soon be splintered, bodies are fragile, the king lives in a castle on the hill and commands a sizable army, the president can call down drone planes to strike tent cities like lightning from the sky.

So she’s there. It’s a Friday night. She’s dancing. She likes to grind, and so do the boys, and so do the other girls. It’s an international scene, beyond bourgeois; some of these kids will one day sit on a couch in the White House and negotiate treaties that put navy bases ten miles from their greatest port cities. The linguae francae are English, French, and Spanish, but there’s a fair amount of fashionable slumming in Kreyòl, especially when it comes to the Dutch and the Germans. Her father’s threat hangs like a guillotine over her head, and if that sounds dramatic, try to remember your veins full of the chemicals of adolescence. As it happens, there is a crucial calculus exam the next morning that she’s hidden from her father, the AP Calculus BC exam, which will demonstrate to the bigots at Brown that she’s not just some girl from a Third World backwater, that she can hang with the kids from prep schools or Paris. There was a time she knew this stuff cold, but because of her advanced standing, it’s been a while. It’s been busy at the Beirut — otherwise, her father would be on top of the dates the way he has been most of her life. All she needs is a few hours to brush up on parametric equations, polar and vector functions, plus maybe a little jogging of the mind where polynomial approximations and series are concerned, especially Taylor series, Maclaurin, all that nonsense.

She has to get home, but there’s this beautiful boy from Miami. At first she thinks he’s Haitian, but he says no, his father is an attorney and a representative in the Florida statehouse, and his mother is a chemistry professor at St. Thomas. He’s not Haitian, only his grandmother is, and he’s here with her and his mother, visiting ignorant relatives. It’s a drag. Under other circumstances she’d push back against this kind of talk, but he’s older, he’s built, he’s got teeth like Denzel Washington. Then he says he’s a med student. University of Miami. He tells her about the cadaver work, and he likes it when she doesn’t recoil. You’re real cool, he says, and she likes this too, more than she could have imagined. I have to get home, she says. She tells him about the calculus exam, and he says, What? Integrals? Derivatives? That’s nothing. I could get you there in an hour. He talks smart for five minutes about antidifferentiation, and she has never met a boy like this. Providence, Rhode Island, is probably crawling with them, but who’s to say? Come home with me, he says, so she calls her mother and tells her she’s staying at a girlfriend’s house, and she makes all the necessary arrangements of deception with the girlfriend, like she’s done plenty of times before.

Then they’re off. He drives a rented Mercedes with bulletproof windows. He’s got the Wyclef Jean suite at the Hôtel Montana. The rest of his family is in his great-aunt’s gingerbread house, but he refuses to stay there, and his mother indulges him. She says he’s selfish and small-minded, but secretly she’s proud she’s raised such an American. She wishes him the distance from here to the moon, and the money to get the liquid fuel and build the steel cylinder.

In the suite he kisses her face and kisses her neck and kisses her collarbone, and he says, Do you want to? and she says yes, and she’s done it before, but not like this, not with someone who knows what he’s doing. She’s just beginning to know her own body too, that’s important, and because she hardly knows him, she can run her own show. He’s a version of himself he will never be for another person in the sixty years he has left to live. Idealized and utmost. The sum total of the available love and lust in the Northern Hemisphere. She fixates on his one cracked fingernail.

It’s not yet morning when they’re good and exhausted, and she’s complaining: I can’t keep my eyes open. I can barely lift my pencil hand. She kisses his chest and says, The bad people sent you to keep me from Brown. She kisses his forehead and says, I hate you. She kisses his mouth and says, You’ve ruined everything.

He reaches into a bag beside the bed. He props himself up on one elbow. He unscrews a plastic safety lid. I’m not the bad people, he says. He takes a strand of her hair between his fingers.

Try this, he says.

I have taken a few 30-milligram slugs of amphetamine salts in my time. They arrive in yellow pharmaceutical capsules dosed at 60 milligrams. You take a sheet of wax paper and cut two three-inch squares, open the capsule, and pour it out onto one of the squares. Then you take a razor blade and separate the salts into two piles of equal size. Then you put one of the wax paper sheets under the other one and push one of the piles onto the lower sheet. Carefully, so you can avoid wasting any of the precious salts. Then you chew the head off a Gummi Bear, fold the wax paper into a kind of funnel, channel the salts into one side of the yellow capsule, and cap it with the Gummi Bear head. That’s supply enough for two days. Then you pour a big glass of water and swallow one of the half-capsules. Then you wait half an hour. Then the angel of bliss and joy and every earthly pleasure pierces your crown with the tip of her wing. Right there in the center of your brain — a place where you don’t otherwise feel anything — you can feel the squirt of a cold pleasant liquid. It fills your head and then you can feel a lifting throughout your body, and there is no touch, no kiss, no orgasm in the world to rival it. You are flying, but you are clearheaded. Sleep is no longer at issue. You deeply love whoever is imprinted on you by the fact of their presence. For twelve or fifteen hours you can contemplate a fixed point fifteen feet in front of you, or you can become the most productive person in the history of human beings.

The high is directly proportional to the complexity of the brain work you bring to it. More than once I’ve filed for Reuters or IPS this way, and I’ve tried other things — composing on the piano, reading Proust, playing chess with Ben Fountain — but imagine her synapses on speed and calculus. Lit up like the Main Street Electrical Parade, Pete’s Dragon, and twelve Mary Poppins chimney sweeps in tight black shirts, dancing to Kraftwerk, a pharmacological miracle that ends in a wooden desk chair in a concrete kindergarten in Port-au-Prince, under the stern eye of a Jamaican proctor named Madame Roosevelt, who wears her glasses on a chain around her neck and watches Anna Nasser’s pencil fly through graph analyses, asymptotic and unbounded behavior, every near-quantification of infinity.

She’d been awake for thirty hours when she went back for more of the salts and more of the boy, and when they swam in the pool this was love, she’d do anything, forget Providence, she’d never seen snow and there was no reason she ever needed to see snow. They both opened their eyes underwater. Their noses were less than an inch apart, and when they surfaced, he said, I’ve never met anyone like you, in all my life, swear to God, and it felt so good to believe him. Her body had become a magical forest, and somewhere in the center there was a wizened old lady with a stove and a lantern, and later, in the bathtub, he said he liked those stories too, anything creaky with yellow pages and British diction, anything partially in Elvish.

He flew home, but he flew back. He studied on the airplane. He cut classes here and there to squeeze out two-day visits in the Wyclef suite, three or four a month. In the hotel, he studied, and she studied alongside him. All they did was sex and swim and study, and there was no way of knowing which was better. She told her parents she’d joined a ballet class, strictly amateur stuff, but as fitness goes it was better than tennis or cross-country. She got bold, showed her mother how toned her glutes had become. She was taking the cut capsules all the time now, and though her energy was extraordinary, she found that she needed very little food. Her face became angular in a way that almost everyone attributed to good health. At the late spring parent-teacher conference, all the American schoolmarms raved. She imagined them in their sad, thin blouses and frumpy haircuts, waving the Anna flag, and then she imagined what such a flag would look like. It would be the periodic table of elements on a lipstick-red field the shape of a swallowtail, fixed above the mainsail of a luxury yacht. Yes, her father told her teachers. We are very proud of our Anna.

The third week of April, he said, Do you love me? Yes, she said. How much do you love me? The most. What if I told you I was in trouble? Anything, she said. Would you punch a hundred priests in the face? Anything, she said, I’d kick my grandmother in the knees. He quoted two French psychoanalysts, both dead, on the subject of bicycle horns and how it’s the triangle’s job to vibrate, to resonate, under the pressure of what it retains as much as what it thrusts aside. He spoke of the orchid and the wasp, the lateral spread of bamboo and other grasses through subterranean rhizomes. He said he’d lost a lot of money at a cockfight at the edge of the Everglades, and though he’d had a lot of money, it was mostly gone now. The people he owed had made threats, not only against his neck and knees, but also against his mother’s and his father’s. My father wants to be a congressman one day, he said.

Be quiet, I love you, I’ll do it, she said. What do you want me to do?

There is so much we will never know. Maybe she was conflicted about her choices. Maybe she rationalized: What is $200,000 to my parents? Maybe she bargained: I will pay them back silently one day. I will hire a lawyer to set up a blind trust in the Bahamas. I’ll be making neurosurgery money. I’m good for it. Or maybe her motives were darker, maybe she had simmering resentments, and the thought of his beautiful knees broken tipped the pot. Perhaps whatever second thoughts she might have had couldn’t match the power of the promise she had made without knowing what it was she was promising: Be quiet, I love you, I’ll do it. I need you to tell me, he said: Who is the most terrible person you know? It has to be a truly despicable person, the worst person, a person other people would believe capable of the craziest, the most vulgar, the most violent things otherwise beyond imagining.

Her answer was the same as anyone’s answer would have been, under the circumstances: Charles Leblanc, nineteen years old, the son of Canadian missionaries who ran an orphanage in Delmas. He’d been kicked out of the Baptist school for carrying a knife, then reinstated despite massive faculty resistance the following year. He’d been seen driving around town with the gang that called themselves the Dominoes, waving a Glock out the passenger side window. It was said he wore white sneakers he had stolen from a fifteen-year-old Polish boy at gunpoint. He liked to brag about his connections with several of the kidnap gangs, the chimères, those lost boys who had been raised out of the slums of La Saline and Cité Soleil. Even their name a secret: chimères, specters invisible of body, ghosts. Don’t call me Charles Leblanc, he’d been saying. That’s my slave name. I’m giving up my Canadian passport. I was born in Pétion-Ville. I’m as Haitian as anybody. I’m as revolutionary as anybody. I’m as badass as anybody.

He wanted to be known instead, far and wide, as the white chimère. He said one day he’d be the richest man in Haiti. One day, he said, he would handpick the president with his money. He’d have the country’s mineral wealth privatized, buy it for a pittance, sell it to the Russians on the open market, build a national network of trains to link his factories to seaports, die wealthy as a Carnegie or a Rockefeller. The bourgeois kids scoffed at this boasting — Watch out, ladies, here comes the white chimère! — but after a classmate, a fellow Canadian, shorthanded it to Casper, as in the Friendly Ghost, this classmate was accosted outside his house one day and pistol-whipped, and he would never say by whom, so you knew, everyone knew, and Leblanc got what he wanted from the whole affair: a little respect, a little deference, a little fear.

Tell Leblanc you have been thinking about him, the boyfriend said. Ask him if he’d like to hang out for a little while after school. Tell him you aren’t one hundred percent sure you want to fuck him. Tell him you are only ninety-six percent sure. Tell him you’ll decide on the road to Boutilliers. Tell him you’ll ride with him, no problem. Make sure twenty or thirty people see you get in his truck.

So she did. She told him that morning, and Leblanc spent the rest of the day bragging to the other boys. I’m going to bag the Beirut princess, he said. He pantomimed a little tiara on her head. At lunch he stared at her across the cafeteria, and she smiled sweetly at him. She told the other girls at her table he’d invited her over to help him study, but she had a bad feeling about the whole thing. Something was off by a degree and a half. Don’t go, they said. Maybe I won’t, she said. But then, after school was over, she made a show of dropping her books in the parking lot dirt, and a few people came over to help her pick them up, and when they were safely in her arms, she got into Leblanc’s truck. First, Boutilliers, she said, and they drove away, down one set of mountains, through the city, in the direction of another. Somewhere in between — no one has been able to establish with any certainty where — she asked him to make a quick unscheduled stop, and that was when they both disappeared for a few days.

When I was downtown, I liked to ride the tap-taps to hear the local versions of the news I was supposed to be reporting, and that’s where I was when I first heard about the disappearance of Anna Nasser. I was among people I mostly knew, at whose tables I had taken meals. Ghislaine said the ransom note was written in blood on paper made from the skin of babies. Yves said the ransom note was sewed inside a pouch full of poison. Yvette said the ransom note was sent by text message from a Digicel phone near the smaller airport in Port-au-Prince. Serge said the ransom note was hand-delivered by three masked men in a red truck. Prudeut said there was no ransom note, just a raspy voice on the phone and a lot of heavy breathing: Two hundred thousand dollars for the rich girl.

Not all of these things turned out to be true, but there was a text message from the smaller airport, and there was a raspy voice. Smallpox doesn’t spread any faster than gossip, and there’s always a little bit of the devastating and true stowed away like an urchin child among the more ostentatious baggage, the steamer trunk wardrobes and the suitcases with the leopard-print slipcovers.

When her father gets the phone call, he is in bed with a woman who is not his wife. She is a good woman, and his wife is a good woman, which makes him believe that, in this moment, he is a bad man. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe by now he’s come to think of these liberties as due compensation for the low-to-the-ground life he’s lived in service to the futures of others, all those long days in the store or at the port, all those late hours hunched over the accounting books, the imported bottle of Glenlivet untouched at the edge of the desk for the sake of clarity with the all-important numbers. Her leg is thrown over him, this woman he believes to be truly beautiful, whose aesthetic interests align with his, her good taste in music, her sense with fashion, her ease at talking. He loves her voice; he loves the smell of her; he steals what hours he can to sit with her in the evenings and talk and listen to records. He can imagine a future with her, but it is an unlikely future. More often his fantasies run in the other direction, toward a past where he met her as a young man, and the world and time spread unknown before them, perhaps in an easier country, perhaps in a Costa Rican villa, perhaps in an oceanside house in Belize, not far from Francis Ford Coppola’s, California wine in the evening, sophisticated conversation, movie actors, cigarettes.

Two hundred thousand dollars for the rich girl. First the phone call, then the text message. Come alone. Bring $10,000 in $100 bills. Have exactly $190,000 in a new account, and bring the account numbers. Don’t tell your wife. Don’t call the police. For all you know, this might be the police. Believe, now and forever, that you are speaking with the police. Be ready at all hours. Keep the phone near your head. We came for her, didn’t we, like a thief in the night? We came, didn’t we, on blood horses in the sky? We came, didn’t we, with knives and automatic rifles? In the fullness of time we’ll call. We’ll tell you when and where. Take off your shirt, get in your car, drive to the place. Keep her safe. Don’t make her unsafe because of your bad behavior. The time is now to start making good choices. Listen to the sound of my voice. I’m your best friend, Samir Nasser. You have no better friend in the world.

Twelve hours passed. He put on his good suit. He made quiet inquiries with friends whose children had been kidnapped and ransomed, but they all had American passports. They had the FBI. There would be no FBI for Samir Nasser. He went to the banks and did his business, and his bankers thought nothing of what he’d asked. He’d asked for more in the past, quickly, and anyway it was not a country where bankers felt it prudent to ask too many questions of businessmen.

When the call came, he was ready. He took the money. He took off his shirt. Delmas 73, the voice said, and he drove there and waited. The parking lot of the police station, the voice said, and he drove there and waited. Do you have the money? Yes. Good. Drive to the Lesly Center near the cathedral and wait. He did. Do you want to see your daughter alive? Yes. Good.

Drive to the Marché Hyppolite and park on the street and wait. Do you see that man on the street in the white shirt? Do you see that woman selling lettuce? We have eyes by the hundreds. You must be humble. Have you been humble in your life, Samir Nasser? Are we good friends? Touch the bag with the money. Take off your pants. Fold them. Set them in the passenger seat. Put them back on. You can’t walk out into the street, a rich man without pants. Walk in the direction of the palace. See that tree? Set the money there. Don’t worry. We are watching the tree. Walk away. Get in the car. Drive toward home. You will await further instructions. It’s not yours to know when. You’ve done well, Samir Nasser. Tonight you may drink for pleasure. Kiss your banker for me.

It was three days before he saw his daughter again. He went on the radio to make his plea. I’ve paid the money. I’ve done all you’ve asked. Be honorable, he said.

There was a general buzzing throughout the province. Everyone agreed that the chimères had taken her because her parents owned the Beirut. People argued about the nature of the Lebanese: All Lebanese are thieves. Is it wrong to steal from thieves? Fewer Lebanese are thieves than Haitians are thieves. Everything in Haiti belongs to Haitians, not to the Lebanese. All the children of the world belong to their parents. All the children of Lebanon belong in Lebanon. She was born in Haiti. Her mother and father were born in Haiti, and their mothers and fathers. She is a Haitian citizen. She travels with a Haitian passport. She is blan. She is Haitian. She is bourgeois. She is a human being. She is a parasite in the intestine.

Samir washed his face three times daily. He rubbed his wife’s shoulders. The house filled with relatives he was expected to feed at all hours, and Samir told his wife not to tell anybody anything. Maybe there’s a spy among us, he said. He told the relatives in the house that they must be strong. In the bathroom, beneath the Levantine crucifix, he pissed blood. He had a vision of Lake Pontchartrain, a body of water he’d once crossed by bridge in the company of a woman from Boston. He was upset by the unnecessary word chimère. These were young men, not ghosts. But what was more disturbing, the taking of his daughter by young men or ghosts? The beating of his daughter by young men or ghosts? The sexual assault of his daughter by young men or ghosts? Young men had bodies. Young men could torment bodies with bodies. Ghosts could only torment the mind, the spirit. Ghosts could slip into the invisible night, flee on a carriage of warm air, ride some passing storm, stir it into a hurricane, but young men could be hunted down and killed, and Samir felt capable of killing. He felt the ferocity of a father, the skull inkwell from which he’d pen the fated names the moment he learned them.

Then it was three o’clock in the morning. He was sitting on the front porch with the night watchman when the buzzer rang from the gate, where she stood wrapped in a sheet she said she had stolen from a laundry line, and the owner of the sheet had chased her through the streets for half a kilometer. We must pay her for the sheet, she said, and he picked her up, cradled like a child, and carried her into the house, and kissed her cheek and her forehead, and didn’t even tell anyone she was home, and rocked her in her mother’s gliding chair, and pressed her cheek to his cheek, and together they wept until they woke her mother, and then the room was full of people, and he sent them out into the yard, and told the night watchman to turn on the yard lights, and told the cook to bring out the food and set it on picnic tables, and they went into the bedroom, the three of them, and got into the bed, under the covers, husband and wife and daughter in the middle, the way they had when she was a newborn baby, and they cooed without embarrassment, made all the same sounds they had made when she was a newborn baby, and touched her face, and her back, and stroked her hair the same way they had when she was a newborn baby, and the whole room filled with the rank, unwashed smell of her, and her mother drew her a bath, and her father set her in it, and he left the room as her mother washed her.

On the radio, the priest from Bel Air said enough is enough. Is this not our country? he said. We must claim it for decency. All children are ours. I will provide the candles, and we will raise them to the sky, and all the saints will be reflected in the flames, and all our ancestors.

The procession wound through the city, the marchers and their candles, and others joined them as they marched. When she appears on the balcony, her mother said, she must be wearing a white dress like a baptismal dress, and they summoned the tailor, and quickly, while she had the curlers in her hair, the dress was made ready.

Here again: ugliness and beauty. What was it like for her to look at herself in the mirror in the supermarket fur shop, her hair in dark ringlets to her shoulders, the white dress, the waiting crowd, the grieving and rejoicing parents, the boyfriend on his way to the airport with the bag of cash, the preparation of the fireworks, the secret knowledge opening a void inside her. You are a woman, and I have treated you like a child, her father said. He put his hands on her shoulders. When you get to Rhode Island, don’t come back. Don’t write for a while. Don’t call. Put this place behind you. But before you go, if you can bear it, tell me the faces, tell me the names, whatever you know, I will put an end to their comfort.

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 girl: 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.