Lost Girls (8 page)

Otherwise life was about waiting, waiting for their food, waiting for their shot of heroin, waiting to be taken upstairs to service strange men. Praying they would not be dragged to the platform or, worse, to the red room.

Aleksandra told her about the women who had been brought to the cellar with her. How some had died on the ship coming over. Those women had come and gone as had two other truckloads since. Jill saw the last group with her own eyes. They came in the middle of the night. The women were herded into the cellars and made to kneel on the platform as guards stood behind them with rifles. Each was stripped and raped in front of the others. Later they were taken one at a time from their cells to the red room. All night long you could hear their screams.

“Why don’t they take us away?” Jill had wanted to know.

“They don’t take you because you are rich,” Aleksandra told her. “Rich, people would recognize your face. There is probably a great price on your head. Think about it, it’s only been a little more than a month since you went missing. The Dominican Republic will still be swarming with cops. Maybe even your own FBI is on the other end of the island. They will be putting great pressure on the Dominicans and Haiti to allow them to search for you. If your parents are as rich as you say, there will be a reward for you, no? What would they pay to get you back, a half million dollars? A million? It would be a dilemma for the traffickers. None of these other women you see are ever missed. No one is looking for them and no one ever will. That is why you are never taken upstairs. It is also why you are safe from harm, my little friend. Safe for the time being.”

“But if I’m worth so much reward money, why wouldn’t they sell me back to my parents?”

Aleksandra shook her head slowly. “You don’t know what kind of money is out there in the world. You hear the helicopters. You see the women come and go. A million dollars means nothing to these people. The less heard about you, the better for them. They don’t want the attention.”

“So they will kill me?”

Aleksandra reached for Jill’s shoulders. “No, not unless they feel threatened. They will keep you. You will live to see tomorrow and any tomorrow could make you free.”

Jill looked doubtful. “And why haven’t you been sold, Aleksandra?” she asked.

“I am also a curiosity.” Aleksandra laughed tiredly. “The one-eyed man thinks I am a challenge. He likes to show me he is the one in control by not killing me. I will never leave here, though. Not as long as he is alive.”

Jill had never heard of Aleksandra’s kidnapping before, but then policewomen gone missing in Poland would hardly make Western news.

It must be hard for Aleksandra not to feel resentful at times, she thought, to know the search was still fresh for an American who disappeared on vacation rather than for a policewoman who had been missing three times as long, a policewoman who had just been doing her job in some bleak European harbor.

Jill, who had now seen women come and go from the cellar, could see that they were common people. They were dressed poorly, probably had little education. These men preyed on the weak. Their victims had few alternatives, had surely been driven to their demise by some hope for a better life.

Jill was thinking plenty about alternatives these days.

Contestus, named for the saint, was a mountain cathedral, built by slaves upon the stone and marble quarry from which it was made. Slaves had to be imported from Africa by the French to harvest sugar and coffee because the Spanish who preceded them had already decimated the indigenous Indians.

It was said that the dark mortar used to fuse the marble into floors and walls was stained red from the African blood with which it was mixed. The blood of its priests likewise stained the rocks of Monts de Cartache, when they were thrown screaming from the towers a hundred years later. That uprising of 1791 would lead to the first free black republic on the face of the earth.

Contestus fell to ruins over the next century. In time the spires were little more than a curiosity for island explorers and a landmark for early airplane pilots charting the Caribbean Sea. In 1927 it was purchased by mulatto coffee millionaire Christian Rousseau, who restored the magnificent stone and marble ruins to produce a hybrid that was part medieval castle—complete with ramparts and suits of armor—and part country manor, with its ancient cathedral spires rising tall above the jungle. The manor loomed magnificent over the glittering Windward Passage between Haiti and Cuba.

The quarry behind it had been abandoned and the foundations squared to accommodate stables for the horses and large food stores for the guests and staff.

Then a meek country doctor came to power and Haiti entered its darkest age. For the next fifty years the Duvaliers would terrorize the people, destroying the land of generations, raping the natural resources and an entire nation’s economy. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier—and later his son, Baby Doc—would leave a bloody legacy, which would come to recall Contestus when slavery was resurrected.

There was never a rational moment when it came to Papa Doc Duvalier. Three years after the doctor seized power in a military coup, he suffered a massive heart attack that left him in a coma. After he was unconscious for nine hours, his own advisers agreed he had suffered irreversible brain damage. As Papa Doc revived, he claimed to have been possessed by the voodoo god Baron Samedi, spirit of the dead, portrayed by Haitians as a skull wearing a top hat. Duvalier immediately commissioned a portrait of himself with Jesus Christ standing over his throne and resting a hand on his shoulder. He began to affect the look of Baron Samedi, wearing a top hat, and spoke in a nasal voice on camera. He encouraged the myth of zombies wandering the land.

In 1961 he disbanded the country’s military—fearing a coup—and replaced them with secret police fashioned after Mussolini’s Black Shirts of fascist Italy. He granted the secret police immunity from crimes yet to be committed and offered them not salary but spoils of enemies of state.

They found many.

In 1964 Papa Doc executed his secret police commander, fearing he was growing too powerful, and along with him the royal guard and countless civilians. The year he declared himself president for life he named Jean Bedard—a university graduate from the slums of Port-au-Prince—his new commander of secret police, designated the Silver Militia, but history remembers them only as the Tonton Macoutes—“Uncle Knapsack” in Creole—named for the legendary bogeyman who came to collect bad children in his knapsack at night.

The Macoutes’ first order of business under Commandeur Bedard was to eradicate the mulatto aristocracy that ruled the land and seize their assets for the new “president.” Bedard went about his job with chilling efficiency.

The Macoutes, numbering ten thousand, spared no one, not women, not children. They went from city to city, parish to parish, burning, raping, looting, and when they got around to seizing Contestus—the coffee magnate Rousseau had long since fled to France—Bedard had it surrounded with machete-wielding Macoutes, wearing their omnipresent sunglasses and zombie-like smiles, and declared it home.

The views from Contestus were truly staggering, pastel green seas extending west across the Jamaica Channel, ships’ masts and superstructures crossing the Windward Passage to the north, rolling foothills of the many Mornes falling away like the brown and green ripples of a peasant’s skirt. Better yet, the face of Monts de Cartache rose 2,000 feet and was accessible by a single mountain road, making Contestus all but impregnable. This was the beauty of Contestus to Bedard. He was literally king of this world. And here Bedard would begin to amass a great fortune.

By the time he was thirty he had seized the country’s plantations and monopolized produce exports. For a pittance, he purchased a fleet of oceangoing freighters forfeited by Jean Claude Jasmine, who had ties to two young up-and-comers in Colombia, Pablo Escobar and Thiago Mendoza. Jasmine, in his enthusiasm to emulate the flamboyant Escobar, had the misfortune to bring informants into his inner circle and ended up with a life sentence in an American prison.

Bedard, who wanted nothing of publicity, aligned with Mendoza instead, buffering his business holdings with puppet corporations and armies of accountants and attorneys.

Bedard swore he would never forget the lesson of Jean Jasmine’s demise. Officers of record took the risks for his corporations, men who reported only to him, men whose fortunes and lives, even the lives of their families, depended on him. To cross Bedard was a death warrant and one that the former Macoutes would carry out no matter if Bedard were dead or alive. Bedard demanded loyalty. There were no in-betweens.

Bedard’s freighters moved in and out of Haiti’s major seaports with impunity, subject to neither inspection nor regulation. His many spies were in the Haitian National Police, he had jail guards and he had chiefs on the payroll, and when the American DEA interfered in Caribbean waters, he even had someone in the narcotic interdiction office to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls of the drug unit’s commander, an American-trained Haitian, named Colonel Deaken.

The narcotics business near the turn of the century had evolved into a model of corporate efficiency. Thiago Mendoza, providing the crop and refineries, could not export enough of the stuff to meet demand. Bedard’s unfettered pipelines from Haiti to Europe supplied distribution centers managed by men and women with marketing and financial degrees, none of whom had ever set eyes on a processing lab, who all shared profits and risks in the ever-growing economy of addiction. As Thiago Mendoza became a billionaire, Bedard’s own fortune grew rapidly, modest by comparison, but he had already outpaced his own president’s wealth.

The Americans would eventually turn up the heat on their war on drugs and Pablo Escobar declared war on them. On December 2, 1993, that proved to be a fatal error. Pablo Escobar was gunned down on a rooftop in Medellín.

Thiago Mendoza, on the other hand, isolated himself in the remote mountains of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where communist rebels loyal to him protected his poppy fields and processing plants.

Then Mendoza began to diversify, importing small arms shipments out of Belgium, low-grade uranium and cesium-137 hidden in engine blocks out of the fractured Soviet Union, women at the rate of a hundred a month out of Russia to be sold as prostitutes in Southeast Asia. Jean Bedard in Haiti facilitated this by hiding human contraband in his ships, using the same false holds welded between freshwater tanks for transporting Mendoza’s cocaine to Eastern Europe.

The arrangement between Thiago Mendoza and Jean Bedard would net $60 million a year and with none of the scrutiny his cocaine trade received. Law enforcement agents around the globe were confounded by their very own absence of laws. There were no international sanctions, no crimes per se in the people trade. Even the misdemeanors it presented were difficult to prosecute; an employment scam arrest, a harvester charged with pandering, a violation of fair labor…All the while great fortunes were being made and new opportunities were presenting themselves in Eastern Europe.

War and poverty were a trafficker’s two best friends. Widows and daughters displaced from their homelands were ripe for the picking, and Mendoza charged Bedard to employ more and more harvesters.

Many of the women from battle-ravaged cities came willingly to sell themselves and their daughters into domestic bondage, believing they could buy back their freedom in time. Some came as prospective employees for corporations that did not exist or were lured as would-be models, actresses, singers, or musicians. Some were Russian brides for men that did not exist, some were granted work or travel visas with unexpected ease. Some were simply kidnapped off the streets.

Bananas, coffee, mahogany, and cocaine heading east; guns, nuclear waste, and women heading west. Bedard had even begun to freight humanitarian relief stores out of Europe bound for Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Tons of grain and seed and medicine and machinery afforded him new opportunities to make port in the harbors of Germany, France, and Italy, where his ships were given priority and seldom boarded by ICE or drug interdiction agents.

He unleashed even more harvesters upon them.

To be sure, Mendoza’s influence on trafficking women was only a fraction of the world market in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Then an Indian Ocean tsunami reduced Southeast Asia to rubble in 2005 and Brazil, not Thailand, became the sex-tourism capital of the world. Business quadrupled.

He really couldn’t have planned it better. It couldn’t have been easier money for the truly unremarkable risk. More ships brought more women, profiting the harvesters who lured them off the streets, profiting Bedard in nearby Haiti, who initiated them to discipline and then conveyed them to Mendoza’s men, who moved them through South America to Brazil to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The women, made to work impossible hours for their merciless masters, paid for themselves in a year’s time and reaped profits for several more. But trafficking, like narcotics, was a self-perpetuating enterprise. The women had a shelf life. In four or five years they lost their appeal and were devalued, sold on declining markets until they reached the bottom rung of the ladder, the mining town brothels and backwater saloons, some in the end sold to drug gangs and jungle camps of leftist rebels.

It was usually a five-year free fall from the glitter of Rio de Janeiro to cow towns in Brazil or Argentina or Colombia or Peru. None had imagined such a beginning or end. None had guessed they would be spending the last years of their lives addicted to heroin and craving it for their wages. None would have believed that heroin would become their single reason for living, their only friend until the day they were deemed unserviceable, and that in the end even that would be taken from them.

Of course there were unavoidable risks in any business. An occasional shipment was lost at sea to oxygen contamination in the poorly ventilated holds. Sometimes one of the women had a breakdown and could not be controlled. When that happened Bedard had bodies on his hands, or more apropos, he had physical evidence to get rid of.

Bedard didn’t worry about ships’ crews testifying against him; dozens of straw corporations insulated him from the day-to-day business of his freighters. More important, every captain and crew member had a family in Haiti and an understanding of the consequences of betraying Jean Bedard. In a country with an 80 percent unemployment rate, men lined up to sell their souls and willingly risked their families as well.

What kept Bedard up at night was evidence. You couldn’t threaten the evidence. Policemen in the superpowers had a near mystical ability to connect disjointed pieces of crimes and conspiracies. From voice recognition of incriminating conversations to microscopic pollens or undigested food cooked in your kitchen, you never knew when you had misspoken or were suddenly contaminated by something that connected you to something else. He had read about a case in the United States where a man was found guilty of murder because the cops proved DNA of dog shit found on his shoes matched the murdered man’s dog on a remote farm. It was proof he had been where he said he had not.

It was always the little things that got you and the older you got, Bedard thought, the more dog shit you had collecting on your shoes.

Which was why Bedard had been concealing the bodies of his victims in the ancient quarry behind the foundation of Contestus for thirty years. It simply wasn’t prudent to trust their bones to a capricious sea.

Bedard’s link to narcotics trafficking was no secret to the American DEA. His ties to Thiago Mendoza—including a mansion in Mendoza’s backyard, Santa Marta, Colombia—suggested only one conclusion. But Haiti was a morass of crime and corruption; even past presidents profited directly from cocaine. Bedard might be one of Mendoza’s many exporters of cocaine, but with all his layers of protection he never quite made the top of the DEA’s most wanted list. And Bedard’s compound continued to go unnoticed under the protection of Haiti’s anti-American government.

But times were changing. Thiago Mendoza, now deceased, had been suffering this last year from incurable cancer. His son and successor, Sergio, a man Bedard had met only weeks ago, also lay dead from a mountain-climbing accident in the United States. Haiti was doing its best to look like a democracy, trying to distance itself from its ugly past, and some thought Bedard, the former commander of Papa Doc’s secret police, was an enormous blemish on that history.

Bedard wasn’t worried about being deported. His main residence in Colombia was all the home and protection he would ever need. But he was worried about the evidence of his crimes. He did not want forensics people trampling his castle so they could put him on trial in his last years on earth.

In the end, it was all those things and Jill Bishop that motivated his timing. The shock waves following the American’s kidnapping in the Dominican Republic were still reverberating throughout the capital of Haiti. The Americans had already approached President Préval to allow their search for the girl to extend across the Haitian border. Should the FBI one day convince Préval to let them search Contestus, they would find far more than dog shit on his shoes and Bedard was not about to let that happen.