Nicolas looked down at his shoes, silently pressing his toes against the floor to control his frustration. “Which is precisely why I need it out of my hands.”
“And then what?” Jean-Jean asked.
“Are you trying to get us killed too?” Georges hissed. “And what about your family?”
“I realize it’s a lot to ask,” Nicolas said. “But I can’t just throw this out.”
“Of course not,” Jean-Jean said. “I was thinking a bonfire.”
“Help me, Jean! Or I’ll find someone who will.”
Jean-Jean’s voice burned with an anger Nicolas had never heard before. “Like who? That poor idiot who got caught at the airport smuggling in newspapers? Where is he? No one’s seen him since. Just for bringing in a few op-eds by foreigners! You are not prepared to handle this—”
“But I am prepared,” Nicolas started to argue.
Jean-Jean held up a silencing hand and turned toward Georges, who was now chain-smoking. “Talk some sense into the boy, Georges. What is it your friends at the ministry are calling writers these days? A danger to the Republic?”
Georges blew plumes of white smoke into the air. They curled into spirals and crashed against the art naïf paintings on the wall.
“He’s right, Nicolas,” Georges said. “To ask us to help you with this—it isn’t just madness; it’s callous disregard for everyone’s safety. You simply cannot expect us to release this information.”
“How can I not release it?” Nicolas said. “Who else will talk about it if not me? Are we supposed to go on pretending that Dr. Alexis just vanished into thin air? It’s all here for anyone who could possibly have doubts.” He grabbed another clipping from his notebook and held it up. “I have his signature approving the order to be carried out by the warden of Fort Dimanche.” He pointed at the photo in Jean-Jean’s hand. “It was Jules Sylvain Oscar who ordered his Macoutes to cut—”
“Enough!” Jean-Jean stood up and ran his hand over the thinning gray hair around his bald spot. “I’ve heard plenty.”
He tossed the photograph on Nicolas’s lap. The room fell silent.
Nicolas stood up and looked his mentor in the eyes. “You knew Dr. Alexis, didn’t you?”
“What difference does it make? And how the hell did you get this information, anyway? Who’s your source?”
“I can’t get into that right now,” Nicolas said.
“Bullshit!” Jean-Jean turned away.
The disappearance of Jacques Stephen Alexis four years ago, upon his return from Moscow and Cuba, had left Haiti bruised and drained. Yet another brilliant intellectual the regime had done away with, fearing the contagion of communism. Of course, it had never been proven.
“You need to slow down, approach this differently, and hope—” Georges paused. He looked uncomfortable, constipated. “Hope like hell this doesn’t leak. Who else have you shown this to? Who else have you told?”
“You said you wanted to see him toppled, didn’t you?” Nicolas yelled at Georges, who was lighting another cigarette. Georges brought his gold-ringed finger to his lips.
“You said you knew a guy who prints tracts and distributes them in the middle of the night,” Nicolas said. “Could he print this book in a compact format? This way it would be easier to—”
“Ah non!” Georges shook his head. “Be reasonable!”
“Jean-Jean?” Nicolas turned to the judge, who was staring at him through narrow eyes. “What about the editor you always visit when you travel over the border to visit your sister? I’m sure he’d be interested.”
Jean-Jean gazed back in disbelief. Nicolas waited, his heart racing. Finally, Jean-Jean shook his head. “I can’t believe you’d entertain that idea. What do you want me to do? Travel with a ticking bomb in my suitcase?”
Nicolas didn’t move. He didn’t dare. But he held his mentor’s stare.
“Help me get the book to him while I find my way out of Haiti. The whole world is going to want to read this. I’m not stupid enough to sit here and wait for them to arrest me. I have a plan. But for me to have any chance, the book needs to go out now.”
“They’ll kill you, you lunatic!” Jean-Jean yelled, and immediately caught himself. He peered out the window, but there were only breadfruit tree branches and rosebushes swaying in the evening breeze.
“I’m going to leave the country,” Nicolas reiterated, “and take my family. They won’t find us. Jean-Jean, if she’ll have us, we could go live with your sister in the Dominican Republic—me and Eve and the baby. We’ll hide there until we can figure out how to get to Europe and apply for asylum.”
“Are you really serious?” Georges asked. “Is this what Haiti has done to you?”
“It’s what Haiti is doing to all of us!” Nicolas snapped. “Come on, Georges! Give me a break. You mean to tell me your passport isn’t stamped and ready? You mean to tell me all those phone calls from your kids in Switzerland aren’t about figuring out how to get you out of here? Forever?”
Georges’s eyebrows met for a moment, but he didn’t deny the charge.
Nicolas turned to Jean-Jean. “And you, Jean? Tell me, you old patriot! No one loves his flag more than you, but you’re visiting your sister more and more. Before long, you won’t bother to come back. Tell me I’m not right.”
Jean-Jean tried to answer, but Nicolas cut him off. “I’m not judging you,” he said. “I don’t want to leave either. I love my home. I love my work. I want to be able to do that work without looking over my shoulder all the time. But I have a daughter now, and a wife who lost her whole family last October in that massacre of rebels.”
Nicolas took a deep breath. His friends were silent now, subdued by his outburst. He turned around, pulled out a drawer, and placed the manuscript and his notebook inside before shutting it.
“You know Eve and I had to go into hiding after her father and brothers were killed,” he whispered. “I can’t take the pressure any longer. When I lecture my students, I can feel myself on the verge of telling them that censorship is wrong, that education should never be compromised. This isn’t the Haiti I want my daughter to grow up in.”
The older men let an acquiescent silence settle over the room. Jean-Jean shoved his hands in his pockets. Georges looked at the floor between his shoes.
“It wasn’t always like this,” Jean-Jean said. “We’re better than this.”
He wrestled himself out of the chair, took a few steps forward, and rested his hand on Nicolas’s shoulder. “We’ve had a rocky political history, but never like this, no. Duvalier’s the worst devil of them all.”
A dog barked in the distance, as if in rebuke at hearing Papa Doc’s name spoken out loud. Georges flinched in his seat.
Jean-Jean squeezed Nicolas’s shoulder. His face was sullen. “Walk us out, will you? It’s almost curfew.”
Outside, the gardens hemorrhaged fragrances of rose and jasmine. Eve had potted every variety of fern and red ginger, dangled orchids from the branches of trees, and placed laurels and frangipanis at the entrance to soak the house in color.
The men stopped in front of Georges’s black Citroen. He and Jean-Jean had come together, and now they looked anxiously at their watches.
“Please tell Eve we’re sorry to leave in such a hurry,” Georges said. “Time is our greatest enemy these days.”
Nicolas said nothing. He needed an answer, and his friends were leaving without