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photographer was brought in to capture the bloody corpses on film.
    Beyond the close-up look at the Macoutes and police, his experience at the police was fictionalized in
The Comedians
in the scene when Brown goes to get a pass to travel south. ‘A pass to Aux Cayes cost so many hours of waiting, that was all, in the smell of the zoo, under the snapshots of the dead rebels, in the steam of the stove-like day.’
    On his 1963 visit Graham stayed at the Grand Hotel Oloffson. But the Haiti he encountered bore little resemblance to the land that charmed him seven years earlier when he visited Catherine Walston. Roger and Laura Coster, the former managers of the Oloffson, were long gone. Sensing that politics were going to kill tourism, Roger sold his lease on the hotel in 1960 and decamped to the US Virgin Islands where he went into business with New York restaurateur Vincent Sardi. Al Seitz, an American who had come to Port-au-Prince to help run La Belle Creole department store, now ran the Oloffson. Seitz hired a Macoute for protection. It was the thing to do for many of those who could afford it. Seitz disliked newsmen; he bemoaned their stories as overblown, frightening the tourists away.
    When I met Graham in 1956 he was staying at the upmarket El Rancho Hotel with Walston. I tried to convince them to move to the Oloffson, but Graham said he was a guest of Albert Silvera, the owner of El Rancho, and didn’t want to hurt his feelings by moving to another hotel. But after I took them to the old gingerbread-style palace overlooking Port-au-Prince and introduced them to Coster, they needed no more encouragement. They left El Rancho and spent their last two days in Haiti at the Oloffson where Graham discovered the little barman, Caesar, who made the word’s best rum punches.
    When I first arrived in the country in 1949 I lived in the Oloffson, but after a month I surrendered my room to the termites, certain the place would soon turn to sawdust. The old gingerbread structure, built in 1887 as a villa for the son of Haitian President Tirésias Simon Sam, possessed incredible charm. It was a three-storey wooden structure built on to the side of the hill with two turrets at the end of the façade. The main floor of the hotel had a huge mahogany bar and a long, wide veranda which served as an elevated dining-room. Eight tall doors led into the hotel, the back wall of which was the exposedstone of the mountain. From the top floors one could see the treetops, rusty metal roofs and the bay of Port-au-Prince in the distance and until the devastating 2010 earthquake the three white domes of the National Palace.
    The suite Graham and Catherine occupied became the Graham Greene Suite. Neighbouring suites were also named, hung with ornate painted nameplates of other poets and writers and famous guests who had slept there, among them the actor John Gielgud, director Peter Glenville and Anne Bancroft.
    Graham introduces readers to the Hotel Trianon in
The Comedians:
    The architecture of the hotel was neither classical in the eighteenth-century manner nor luxurious in the twentieth-century fashion. With its towers and balconies and wooden fretwork decorations it had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of the
New Yorker.
You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him. But in the sunlight, or when the lights went on among the palms, it seemed fragile and period and pretty and absurd, an illustration from a book of fairy-tales. I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that it had found no purchaser.
    On his trip in 1963 Graham found the rambling old hotel virtually empty. He said there were only three other guests: the Italian manager of the International Casino and an elderly American couple who had taken up extended residence at the hotel. He considered they were somewhat naïve but sincere people trying to help Haitian